Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride!” Rises: Christian Bale is Frankenstein’s Monster & Jessie Buckley is his Resurrected Companion

The first trailer for Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! has officially risen.

“Was I just the same before the accident?” asks Jessie Buckley’s The Bride in the opening seconds of the trailer for writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! The response comes from none other than Frankenstein’s Monster, played by Christian Bale. “There wasn’t any accident,” he says. “Everything we did, we did it on purpose.”

We see Buckley’s Bride murder, and then we see her very much alive—in a manner of speaking—and face-to-face with the man who helped make it happen, Frankenstein’s Monster, who tells her “there’s nothing left to do now but live.”

Gyllenhaal’s script sends a forlorn Frankenstein to Chicago in the 1930s, hoping to enlist the help of Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening) to help create him a companion. Their solution is to resurrect the corpse of a murdered young woman—Buckley’s The Bride—but when they succeed, they create a being unlike any they could have expected. The trailer reveals that Gyllenhaal’s film is part horror, part romance, part outlaw narrative, with Buckley and Bale’s monstrous couple like a Grimm’s Fairy Tale version of Bonnie and Clyde.

The cast is appropriately star-studded, given Gyllenhaal’s pedigree, which includes her sensational directorial debut, The Lost Daughter. The cast includes Peter Sarsgaard, Jake Gyllenhaal, Penélope Cruz, Julianne Hough, and John Magaro. Gyllenhaal assembled a potent team behind the camera, too, including composer Hildur Guðnadóttir, cinematographer Lawrence Sher, costume designer Sandy Powell, production designer Karen Murphy, and editor Dylan Tichenor.

The Bride! rises in theaters on March 6, 2026. Check out the trailer below.

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Featured image: Caption: Jessie Buckley as The Bride in Warner Bros. Pictures “THE BRIDE!” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures