I Prefer Not To: The Bride! and What Shelley Needed to Say
- 1 day ago
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I, alone in a theater, watching The Bride! (2026), a reimagining of what the monster of Frankenstein’s bride could have been, written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal. Per usual, I yearned for the solitude I often require in movie theaters— to gasp aloud, to let out a gut-busting guffaw, to scream “WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK!” without disturbing others. From its opening moments, The Bride! establishes itself not as a simple retelling but as a conversation across time, reaching back to Mary Shelley, creator of Dr. Frankenstein’s creation, and forward into the twenty-first century. I gasped. I guffawed. When the tables turned, as they often do in films, I did yell out in glee, “WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK!” It was warranted.
Ida, an undead attempting to find out who she is and renames herself “The Bride”, is played by recent Academy Award winner Jessie Buckley. The actress also embodies Shelley in a striking dual role, collapsing the distance between creator and the extension of her original creation. In the film’s opening, Shelley laments, “What I wanted to write, what I needed to say…,” as if offering an addendum to her novel Frankenstein, its 1818 and 1831 editions. The effect is immediate; this is a film much about voice, about what stories are worth telling and who gets to speak, and about what remains unsaid and whose lives are valued, as it is about the other themes of Shelley’s novel.
I was taken by the film’s chaos, which ensues immediately following the opening credits. I grinned the entire time, “I am ENTERTAINED!” This is not a review, for there is no shortage of critical (and not-so-critical) analysis surrounding the film. I’m not interested in contributing. Watch the film. Or don’t. What matters here is not evaluation, but reflection on what lingers, what grips, what insists on being felt during and after my viewing. I am captivated by the themes contemporary entertainment still ponders in this century, one being what the feminine form has consistently endured over time—physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual indifference. And flat-out disdain, if you’re Black and a person of color in a feminine body.
The film’s 1990’s Riot Grrrl, third-wave feminist energy feels intentionally anachronistic, almost antiquated in its transplantation into a 1930s setting and a twenty-first-century audience. Yet the emotional core—feminine rage, vulnerability, curiosity, and expressive revolt—remains urgent. Where the film’s aesthetic feels displaced and a bit off, its language does not. The need to ignite a revolution based upon knowing something sociocultural and political is way off resonates. There is still a lot to be mad about, to be enraged with, to want to burn the fuck down—in 1930s America and now.
One striking recurring image arrives in the form of a newspaper headline, “Brain Attack!” It reads as both diagnosis and metaphor, the feminine mind under siege by the deadening forces of white supremacy and patriarchy. The “She’s Crazy!” trope, ever-present and overused, is the trigger to quiet and subdue those whose words they don’t want heard or believed. Historically, wild, nonconforming women were pathologized, institutionalized, or subjected to procedures meant to silence them. In light of the Kennedys’ resurgence into the U.S. pop culture sphere (Did they ever leave?), Rosemary Kennedy comes to mind—lobotomized in the early 1940s under the authority of familial patriarchy. In Gyllenhaal’s reimagining, Ida/The Bride resists erasure. She outlives the forces that attempt to quiet her, we think. I hope. Rosemary, who passed away in 2005, outlived her silencer as well. 😊
Ida/The Bride’s quiet but persistent declaration, “I prefer not to,” echoes throughout the film. It is a full sentence, a refusal, a boundary. She repeats it as if discovering it in real time, as though the words emerge from somewhere beyond conscious understanding. She may not fully grasp its meaning, but she feels its power. There may or may not be a suggestion of possession, of something inhabiting her that understands before she does. I am not at will to spoil an imperative aspect of the film’s plot. I will say agency here is both mystical and hard-won.
Shelley’s Frankenstein reveals a writer with a vivid, complex inner life, something often overshadowed by the popularity of her creation. I appreciate Gyllenhaal’s imagining of what Shelley’s disposition might have been, a way of giving voice to the dead. One of the film’s themes is the dead are voiceless and bound, “The dead have something to say.” The Bride acts as a vessel for their articulation. She feels like a physical manifestation of what Shelley herself may have desired: agency over her life, freedom to express herself, and the courage to face and analyze the grotesque.
In a sense, The Bride! is not just a reimagining of a monster; it is an act of restoration, a giving of voice to what history has tried to silence.