The Bride! 4K 2026 Ultra HD 2160p

Story Movie

Chicago, the 1930s. Frankenstein’s monster asks Dr. Euphronius to help him create a companion. Together, they bring a murdered girl back to life, and she exceeds their expectations.

Review 4K Movie

The film "Bride!" has been criticized for its unrealized potential as a feminist statement and for overusing references to other films. Since all these criticisms are valid, let’s skip that part and move straight to where I’m raving about Jessie Buckley’s performance.

This is the role—not your “Hamnet”—for which she deserves every Oscar in the world. You are beautiful, Ida Bolinski. The amusing and bitter irony is that this name, which you sought so desperately after your resurrection, is uttered by only one character—the film’s main villain. Zlatko Buric, by the way, has settled into his villainous prime since last year’s “Superman” (does anyone even remember that one?). “You need to shut your mouth, Ida Bolinski,” he says. He also orders his henchmen—corrupt cops—to rip out her tongue. But as we know from Ida’s piercing monologue, no one can silence the dead.
“Look, something is cracking inside her, and I could seep into that crack,” says writer Mary Shelley at the beginning of the film, a full-fledged character in “The Bride.” Mary occasionally takes possession of Ida’s mind, but it doesn’t feel like a takeover. Rather, it feels like an addition to and amplification of what is already within her.

“A mind-boggling vocabulary!” comments Frankenstein on Ida’s manner—borrowed from the writer—of rattling off five synonyms in a row for every noun or verb. And it really is a wonderful, mind-boggling device and a hell of a find. I know of no more graceful or elegant way to emphasize what is being said.

“Stand still! Freeze! Be transfixed! Stiffen! They’re all here—silenced, smothered, suffocated,” Ida says, referring to the women killed by men.

Why the 1930s, you ask? Things are different now, you say? But how many women killed simply for breaking up have been mentioned in the news lately, do you remember? Just this week, for instance—he killed her because she left. Whether it’s the 1930s or any other era, some people still treat women like objects. But the dead, says Ida, have something to say.

“I’d rather pass,” says Ida, who has been brought back to life (in the sense of being resurrected), quoting one of Herman Melville’s characters. “But I have no choice,” she adds in one of the episodes. And in that, alas, there is also some truth.

Frankenstein invented a life for her, implanted memories of events that never happened in her mind, and forced her to remember herself as someone she wasn’t.

And so, having learned all this, Ida wants to leave, but true love holds her back. And in this she differs from Harley Quinn in the second "Joker"—she never loved Arthur Fleck.
All the absurdity, all the repeated (ex)aggeration and grotesqueness had to be shown in the role of Ida. We’d be happy to “just say it calmly once,” but... here’s a detective—played, unexpectedly, by Penélope Cruz—who behaves exactly that way: she speaks calmly. So what? No one listens to her. So yes, sometimes, to be understood, you need what “The Bride” calls a brainwave.

Yes, if you look at the film as a programmatic feminist manifesto, then maybe it is a failure. But the thing is, this is a non-programmatic feminist manifesto. It’s simply a volcano that has erupted.

And by the way, I strongly disagree that the story of Frankenstein is absent from this film. No, of course not. We are shown the true tragedy of someone whose kindness, gentleness, and joy are not needed at all—they are rejected. And the pain of this rejection is something our living corpse is completely unable to hide. And this pain, instant and unbearable—that is his tragedy.

I like this movie; I like Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale; I like Fever Ray—it would have been impossible to find better musicians to invite—I like Jake Gyllenhaal as Ronnie Reed, and I like how unexpectedly poetic Maggie Gyllenhaal looks in photos from the set, in stark contrast to how she appears on the red carpet.

The Bride references everything under the sun—from the 1935 "Bride of Frankenstein" to, as it mistakenly seems, the second "Joker", and even a bit of "Les Misérables". True to the saying: something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue, the Bride appears before us, and it is absolutely impossible to ignore her beauty.