The Bride! has awoken, and she isn’t messing around. Warner Bros. has released a new trailer for the upcoming horror film directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, putting Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley front and center as Frankenstein’s monster and his bride — except this time, it’s their humanity that makes them monstrous.
Also starring Peter Sarsgaard, Penelope Cruz, Annette Bening, and Gyllenhaal’s brother Jake, The Bride! is directed by Gyllenhaal from her own screenplay, which she produces alongside Emma Tillinger Koskoff, Talia Kleinhendler and Osnat Handelsman Keren, with executive producers Carla Raij, David Webb and Courtney Kivowitz. The film’s synopsis is as follows:
A lonely Frankenstein travels to 1930s Chicago to seek the aid of a Dr. Euphronius in creating a companion for himself. The two reinvigorate a murdered young woman and the Bride is born. She is beyond what either of them intended, igniting a combustible romance, the attention of the police and a wild and radical social movement.
Star John Magaro previously described the film as a “a mix of a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie, Young Frankenstein, Frankenstein, Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands,” which seems just about accurate after watching this new trailer. Gone are any of the vestiges of the original Frankenstein story, or Universal’s original Bride of Frankenstein film, replaced by a Prohibition-era Chicago setting and a love story that leans less happily ever after and more Romeo & Juliet.
Gyllenhaal’s version of Mary Shelley’s iconic monster is just the latest in a long line of adaptations of the horror novel, following closely on the heels of Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein film for Netflix. However, the Bride of Frankenstein has rarely appeared in any version on film since her original 1935 appearance — aside from parodies in films like Young Frankenstein — so Gyllenhaal’s film still has an air of freshness to it, despite arriving so soon after del Toro’s.
The Bride! hits theaters on March 6.
