Now on Digital: THE BRIDE! Comes Home

Give this monster movie a chance.

The Bride!
The film is now available to buy or rent on various digital platforms, including Apple TV, Fandango At Home, and Prime Video, all via Warner Bros.

Meeting with disapproval by some critics -- -- and disappointing box office returns -- just $23.4 million worldwide so far, per Box Office Mojo, Maggie Gyllenhaal's bold take on a Frankenstein-adjacent character comes home to digital today, ahead of releasing on physical media (4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD) on May 19, and streaming on HBO Max after that.

"First things first," declared our review by Olga Artemyeva, "Maggie Gyllenhaal achieves what she supposedly set out to do.

"In the current state of affairs, when almost everything moderately afflicts someone and almost nothing truly excites anyone, she managed to come out with a movie that seems to be destined to elicit some genuinely strong reaction and actually ruffle some feathers.

Olga concluded: "It comes off as the film that knows it is not universally likable and wants to make sure you also know it is absolutely okay with that. It is also a film that relies a lot on screaming, both on the screen and off it, as yet another sad part of the universal experience of being a woman - having to resort to yelling at nothing and no one in particular as a way to be somehow heard at all."

Another of our writers, Ronald Glasbergen, wrote of the film: "Maggie Gyllenhaal reassembles the Frankenstein myth into a dazzling patchwork of genres -- monster movie, noir, musical, cinephile beauty-and-beast fever dream. It's exuberant, restless, and visually seductive, yet also a film that sometimes collapses under the weight of its own ambitions.

"Jessie Buckley anchors the chaos as Ida, a woman resurrected without memory who fights her creator's voice inside her head. Her punk poetic defiance gives the film its pulse. Opposite her, Christian Bale's Frank -- a melancholic outcast transplanted to 1936 Hollywood -- watches the world through the glow of movie screens, yearning for meaning and love in celluloid fictions.

"Penélope Cruz lends understated poise as detective Myrna Malloy, drifting through a subplot that hints at coherence with main theme but remains elusive, while Hildur Guðnadóttir's kinetic score effectively drives the tempo .

"Gyllenhaal fills her frames with intelligence and cinematic love, but her film keeps expanding until its dramatic tension dissipates. Rich in ideas and lavish in design, The Bride! ultimately illustrates the very paradox it portrays: creation without the 'selfish gene' that makes humans tick."

As further evidence that the film deserves to be seen by as many people as possible, I'm including below an excellent analysis by director Joe Dante, who certainly knows movie monsters as well as anybody on Planet Earth.

Olga Artemyeva and Ronald Glasbergen contributed to this story.