With Jessie Buckley currently bagging awards left, right, and centre for her heart-wrenching performance in Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, a lot of people have been asking, well, what’s next for the Irish star? The answer is the titular role in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, a wildly ambitious, 30s Chicago-set reimagining of The Bride Of Frankenstein in which Christian Bale plays Frankenstein (the monster, here given his creator’s name), Buckley plays his proposed mate, and the two become lovers on the lam — dancing, driving, and doing crime together. So not quite Hamnet’s tempo then — as you can see in the trailer below;
Florence & The Machine needledrop? Check. Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale going full Bonnie & Clyde? Check. Big, ballsy, super-stylised dance numbers under nightclub lights? Check, check, and treble-check! As if we weren’t already sold on The Bride! after the last teaser, this latest adrenalised look at the movie — which includes a quietly fist-pump worthy moment where Buckley’s undead (anti-)heroine asserts her status as, simply, “The Bride” (eat your heart out Uma Thurman!) — promises that Maggie G is leaving it all out on the field with this ‘of mobsters, monsters, and men’ take on the OG queen of horror. And it’s not all high-octane thrills we’ll be getting here once the sparks fly between Frank and Bride, either. As Gyllenhaal explained to Empire not so long ago, there’s an introspective quality to The Bride!; her monsters aren’t only monstrous, but they’re also “in a lot of pain, like all of us are.”
The official synopsis for the movie — which co-stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Annette Bening, Peter Sarsgaard, and Penélope Cruz — reads as follows: “A lonely Frankenstein (Bale) travels to 1930s Chicago to ask groundbreaking scientist Dr. Euphronious (five-time Oscar nominee Annette Bening) to create a companion for him. The two revive a murdered young woman and The Bride (Buckley) is born. What ensues is beyond what either of them imagined: Murder! Possession! A wild and radical cultural movement! And outlaw lovers in a wild and combustible romance!”
Is it too soon to say the Jessie Buckley 2027 awards season campaign starts here? Well, we guess we’ll find out when The Bride! — one of our most anticipated movies of the year — hits cinemas on 6 March.