16 March 2026 – Three out of four of us in Cinema Club went to see ‘The Bride’.  It was a bit of a wild ride through the imagined, revived thoughts of Mary Shelley, and it was very interesting to see Jessie Buckley portray a hugely different role from her role in the recently-viewed ‘Hamnet’.  It is also of interest to note that the filming for ‘The Bride’ was actually done before ‘Hamnet’.

She was additionally very well-supported by Christian Bale and Annette Bening, and it was a great example of a British story transferred to an American setting to enormously good effect, and the ‘possession’ by Mary Shelley was managed in an excellent, and convincing, manner.

I loved the music in the film, and I especially loved the rendition of ‘Putting On The Ritz’, seemingly a tribute to the earlier Mel Brooks film of ‘Young Frankenstein’, with Gene Wilder.

The plot may have been done before (but never like this), and I wasn’t so sure about the ending, which felt like it was thrown-in to please the audience, rather than being consistent with the rest of the story.  Nonetheless, I would still give it a score of 7.5, whilst IMDB gave it 5.9, and the Rotten Tomatoes score was 5.7 (57%).

Fraser