The Bride! and her hot dead boyfriend

Jessie Buckley is about to have a huge six months, with Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet sure to propel her to the top of the Best Actress race, and just as the Oscars will be peaking in 2026, Buckley will be in theaters with another movie, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, which is due in early March 2026. The teaser for The Bride! dropped yesterday, showing off Jessie Buckley as a Gaga-esque flapper brought back to life to be the companion of Christian Bale’s creature. It looks very…of a muchness.

The Bride! has everything: Jessie Buckley, bleached eyebrows, Christian Bale Doing A Voice, gangsters, murder, and a strong Bonnie and Clyde influence. There’s also a moment in which The Bride calls the creature “Frankie”, so inevitably we’re going to have “Frankenstein was the doctor’s name” dorks showing up any minute, too. It looks like Gyllenhaal is going big on style here, after her relatively grounded feature film debut, The Lost Daughter (which also starred Buckley). I’m good with all of this. The Bride! looks fun and weird and kooky and I would watch Jessie Buckley read the phonebook, she’s an incredibly engaging actor. I like that she’s following her emotionally raw work in Hamnet with something fun like The Bride!, that’s range, baby.

What I can’t get on board with is the current trend of hot creatures in Frankenstein movies. First there’s Jacob Elordi in Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein, who is made to look suspiciously like Nicholas Hoult. Elordi’s creature is very Byronic, with sad eyes and a haunting voice and if anyone knows how to make a monster f-ckable, it’s Guillermo Del Toro, who casts all his monsters as romantic heroes. 

And now we also have Christian Bale as a gangster creature, made up in such a way that the bolts and scars don’t totally obliterate Bale’s handsomeness. Another f-ckable creature! Another sad-eyed wretch longing for love! 

Look, I know Frankenstein is, to some extent, about loneliness and longing, but everyone, please, can we NOT do hot creatures? Frankenstein’s monster is the one monster I just cannot get behind being made f-ckable. Every other monster is fair game and to some extent is meant to appeal to our baser desires. Dracula represents the eroticism of consummation, werewolves appeal to our animal hindbrain, the mummy is about the eternal endurance of love, and so on.

But Frankenstein’s monster is a f-cking corpse. And not like, a f-cking corpse. He’s an actual, f-cking CORPSE. Can you IMAGINE the smell emanating from that man’s pores? There is absolutely no way the creature doesn’t reek, he is made of rotting flesh, can this please be the one monster we don’t fetishize? Clearly, it’s too late, because we have TWO hot creatures coming to cinemas in the span of about four months. Women are so checked out on dating human men we’re sexualizing Frankenstein’s monster. Smash me, roadkill daddy.