The Bride! (2026): Mary Shelley, Desire and the Return of the Gothic Monster
- Ellen Cheshire
- 5 hours ago
- 4 min read
Few novels have cast a longer cinematic shadow than Frankenstein. Since its publication in 1818, Mary Shelley’s story of creation, rejection and responsibility has generated hundreds of stage and screen interpretations, most of them circling the same familiar narrative: Victor Frankenstein creates life. The creature is rejected. Tragedy follows.
When the trailer for The Bride! appeared, I admit I had some reservations. It seemed to suggest a very different direction: the Monster and his Bride recast as an anarchic, almost Bonnie-and-Clyde-like duo. There was a risk that the creature’s more poetic and thoughtful side – the damaged outsider shaped by society’s cruelty – might be pushed aside in favour of something louder and more extreme. As it turns out, there was no need to worry. The conceit, and the context the film builds around it, work remarkably well.
Yet one figure has often remained at the margins of that story: the Bride.
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s film begins exactly there, with the figure who has so often been pushed to the margins. Like many recent Gothic reinterpretations, it is less interested in retelling Shelley’s novel than in probing its emotional and philosophical afterlife.
In doing so, it reminds us just how radical Shelley’s original idea still is.
The bride who barely exists
Readers of Frankenstein are often surprised to discover that the Bride, as she exists in popular culture, barely appears in the novel at all.
Victor Frankenstein does begin to create a female companion for his creature, but he destroys the unfinished body before bringing it to life. The possibility of a second being terrifies him. What if they reproduce? What if they form a new species? What if they turn against humanity?
This moment is crucial. Victor’s fear is not simply scientific caution but social anxiety. A female creature represents uncontrolled desire, autonomy and reproduction. Destroying her body becomes an act of patriarchal control as much as scientific restraint.
Cinema has always been fascinated by the ghost of that missing figure.
Most famously, Bride of Frankenstein (1935, James Whale) transformed the aborted experiment into one of horror cinema’s most iconic images: Elsa Lanchester’s electrified bride with her lightning-streaked hair. Yet even there she exists only briefly, created and immediately horrified by the creature she is meant to love.
In a sense, the Bride has always represented the Gothic’s most unsettling question: what happens when the excluded figure finally speaks?
The Bride finally speaks
Gyllenhaal approaches the material from a different angle. Her film imagines a world in which the Bride survives and moves through society as a living being rather than a laboratory object.
Set in 1930s Chicago, the story unfolds against a backdrop of gangsters, nightclubs and movie palaces. The monster, played by Christian Bale, becomes a lonely outsider navigating a rapidly modernising world, while the resurrected bride, played by Jessie Buckley, begins to discover identity, agency and desire on her own terms.
Stylistically, the film ranges widely. Echoes of the cinematic landscape that produced the classic Universal Monsters appear throughout: Depression-era mythology, gangster cinema and the glamour of early Hollywood. At times the film even slips into dance and musical numbers, with a playful nod to the golden age through the romantic lead played by Jake Gyllenhaal. With so many ideas in motion, the film never risks becoming dull, even if not every element entirely coheres.
What ultimately anchors the film, however, is its shift in perspective. For the first time in a major Frankenstein adaptation, the female creature is not simply an object of male ambition or fear. She becomes the centre of the story.
Gothic desire and modern adaptations
Recent Gothic cinema seems increasingly drawn to these marginal characters. Adaptations no longer aim for faithful retelling but for reinterpretation.
We can see something similar in Wuthering Heights, which I wrote about recently. Like Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, that story has been repeatedly reimagined through the lens of obsession, sexuality and power. In both cases, the emphasis shifts away from the traditional male narrative towards the emotional and psychological experiences of women within those worlds.
These reinterpretations can be uneven, but they reveal something important: the Gothic remains a living genre precisely because its central questions never disappear.
Who creates power? Who controls desire? And who gets to tell the story?
The enduring power of Frankenstein
What makes Shelley’s novel so endlessly adaptable is its openness. Unlike many nineteenth-century works, it does not impose a clear moral judgement. Instead, the narrative unfolds through competing voices: Victor Frankenstein, the creature and the explorer Robert Walton.
Each tells their version of events, leaving readers to decide where sympathy lies.
Modern films continue that tradition by adding new perspectives. The Bride, long treated as a footnote to Victor’s experiment, becomes another voice in that conversation.
Two centuries after its publication, Frankenstein still invites reinterpretation because its central tension remains unresolved. Creation without responsibility leads to catastrophe, yet the desire to create – to imagine and remake the world – is also profoundly human.
The Bride! reminds us that even the characters who barely existed in Shelley’s text can still come back to life.
And, like the monster himself, they may have more to say than we expect.
It may be somewhat whackadoodle, but my, it was fun.
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