Now Showing | The Bride!
- Forgotten Cinema
- 13 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Some movies arrive fully formed. Others feel like they're still figuring themselves out even as the credits roll. Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride! falls somewhere in the middle. It's ambitious, visually arresting, and deeply strange in ways that will stick with you, even if you leave the theater unsure of how you feel about it.
And honestly? That uncertainty is kind of the point of our conversation this week.
What The Bride! Gets Undeniably Right
The film is Gyllenhaal's first major studio production, and as a showcase for her directorial voice, it's genuinely impressive. The visual design is lush, the filmmaking is confident, and the craft on display throughout is hard to argue with. Jessie Buckley is extraordinary as the Bride. It's the kind of performance that carries a film on its shoulders and makes you forget the machinery behind it. Christian Bale, playing the tortured and obsessive Frank, is equally compelling, and the film closes on one of the best end credit songs either of us has heard in recent memory. Butler left the theater singing it.
So why does the whole thing feel just slightly out of reach?
Does the Script Let The Bride! Down?
Butler came away disappointed, and his case is a strong one. Despite everything working on a technical and performance level, the screenplay simply doesn't hold up its end of the bargain. The story meanders in ways that feel less like deliberate ambiguity and more like genuine indecision as if the script never quite settled on what it wanted to say or what kind of film it wanted to be. For a story rooted in creation, identity, and autonomy, The Bride! can feel surprisingly directionless. The foundation is there. The house just isn't fully built.
Field walked out of the theater largely agreeing with that read. But after sitting with it for a day, something shifted. Not a reversal. He's not going to pretend the script problems aren't real, but more of a recalibration. What started to win him over was how fundamentally different the film is from the kind of blockbuster entertainment we've grown accustomed to. There's no algorithmic fingerprint here, no focus-grouped safety net. Gyllenhaal made exactly the movie she wanted to make, and in an era when that kind of creative stubbornness is increasingly rare in big-budget filmmaking, that counts for something.
Is Being Different Enough to Make a Film Good?
That's the question that drove most of our conversation this week, and it's a genuinely tricky one. We don't think "different" should be a free pass. Plenty of films are odd or unconventional in ways that don't serve the story. But we also think there's real value in a film that refuses to look like everything else, even when it stumbles. The Bride! stumbles. It stumbles noticeably. But it stumbles while swinging for something bigger than most films bother to attempt, and that has to mean something.
Our Verdict on The Bride!
Where you land on this one will probably say something about what you go to the movies for. If you need a script that earns every moment it asks of you, Butler's reservations will likely be your reservations. If you're willing to meet a film halfway when its ambitions outpace its execution, Field's experience might be closer to yours. Either way, The Bride! is the rare studio film that actually sparks a conversation, and for us, that's never nothing.
Now Showing is our ongoing series covering new theatrical releases. New episodes drop on YouTube and wherever you listen to podcasts.
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