Trans Rage in ‘The Bride!’

I never expected Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! to affect me so deeply. When I watched it a few days ago, I was practically driven to tears. From the cold open, Jessie Buckley, as Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, there’s something eerily visceral and transcendent about the words pouring forth from her lips.

“What I wanted to write. What I needed to say. I couldn’t. I couldn’t even think it. And I got a cancer of the brain, and I couldn’t write at all, so I died,” says Mary. She’s bathed in a lone spotlight and surrounded by darkness. It swallows her whole. The scene sets up the agonizing and brutal death of being trans and non-binary in the world. A world that hates you so much that it’d rather kill you than save you. And that’s the way of things in 2026.

We first meet the eponymous Bride (Buckley) in a crowded club surrounded by vulgar, disorderly friends and other club-goers. She’s almost instantly in a trance, as though some beast lies in wait behind her starry eyes. She goes by Ida, and she’s yet to step into who she’s always destined to become. That takes time. A long, winding journey stretches out before her. But she has to wait. Wait for a tragic accident that sends her flying backward down a flight of stairs, a trip that sees her break her leg and fracture her skull. Mary Shelley seems to have infected her with a verbose vocabulary. She can’t help but spout heinous but spirited language at the men in her group. It’s that fire that fuels her. The anger hurled at her in retaliation only stokes the flames of her feminine rage.

That rage, though, also belongs to trans people. I don’t speak for the entire non-binary community, but I find myself wrapped like twisted barbed wire or thorny roses climbing up a trellis beneath the trans umbrella. That’s the only way I can describe it. It claws at my stomach sometimes. It’s vermin leaking with a toxic chemical. Ida worms her way into my brain, a salve for contamination that I’ve felt for years. She comes to weaponize her fury to destroy the partriachy, and in effect, heteronormativity. “I can’t breathe,” she heaves in a dreamy sequence in which her head is encased in glass, and Mary Shelley can be heard guffawing at her. “I can’t remember my name.” Mary replies, ostensibly taunting her: “Martha. Winifred. Constance. Jane. Bride of King Kong. Oh, Queen Kong. Mrs. Jekyll. Mrs. Hyde. Mrs. Bride of Frankenstein. It’s not quite right, is it?”

Ida simply repeats the refrain: “I can’t breathe.” She’s suffocated by her own mind. “Find your name, girl…” hisses Mary back, as Ida smashes her face against the glass. “Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.” Ida’s real name eludes her, and she’s can’t focus on anything else. The surreal moment follows Frankenstein’s gruesome slaying of two sexual predators who attempt to rape Ida. Now, they’re on the run from the cops. There’s nothing they can do except flee from Chicago. Bound for New York.

In 2022, I took a trip to Clyde, North Carolina with my former friend Kirsti. We stayed in a rustic cabin; it was so rustic, it didn’t even have proper insulation. The property expanded around the wooden structure, with pathways carved into the otherwise forested area. As I wove through the maze-like design, I stepped into the center of a large clearing. There before me stood a magnificent and magical dead tree that had been adorned with plaster animal heads, including a panther, beads, crystals, and other spiritual trinkets. I could feel its power glowing, as it entered my body. I soon made my way further onto various trails that were, unsurprisingly, lined with gemstones and minerals like quartz in metal baskets. It was clear the Airbnb owners were the “hippie dippy” types. That’s where I found myself. Found my name. Found who I am and have always been.

That story, my story, radiated from the TV screen. Ida’s story was my story. In a heated, third-act conversation, Ida utters a line that struck me in the heart: “Ida… I don’t think that’s my name anymore.” Moments later, she adds, “…The Bride…” Frankenstein expresses how much he adores her new name. “I don’t want to obliterate you. It’s your mind that I love. The Bride! Not till death do us part. I love you till the end of time.” He doesn’t even flinch at her reclamation of the iconic moniker. He embraces her even harder. That’s beauty. He quickly kneels, proposing to her, “The Bride! Will you marry me?” “Oh, Frank, can’t you feel me like I feel you?” Ida replies. “I’m not anybody’s Bride. I would prefer not to.” Once again, Frank doesn’t waver. He accepts her for who she is. That’s beauty.

Along her trajectory of defining her identity, she takes all the rage that’s swollen and rotten inside of her and hurls it into the faces of cis straight white men. Many men step into her path. Simply collateral damage to her exorcising demons and vengeful spirits hellbent on shaming her. But that rage also serves as a deconstruction of what it means to be trans, non-binary, or something else totally outside the confines of society’s rigid, made-up labels. “Can someone help me, please?” Ida sputters in her final moments. By now, Frankenstein is dead, and she’s made her way back to Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening), who started this whole chaotic gender exploration to begin with. She calls out to Mary but is met with silence. She lists off dead women “full of rage”—”so much rage! What about me! Me too!”

Without warning, a firing squad barges into Euphronious’ lab and pumps her full of lead. It’s tragic, devastating, and pulverizing. As Ida convulsed from the countless bullets, tears began welling up and nearly overflowed down my cheeks. It’s the savage reality of anyone who stands firmly outside the norms, much in the same way as Cat People (1942) and Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde (1971), two films that contain equal personal significance. The Bride! joins them, rounding out the trifecta of queerness in horror. Sure, I might still carry around deep-chested rage, but I now know how to control it and turn it on the world.

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! bulldozes you with absurdism, but within that expressive scope, there lies a trans heart burst from the seams. It’s full of rage. Full of blisters. Full of ache that can only be quenched with scorching the earth and everyone on it. When you think about it, truly, it’s the only way. Now, it’s in our hands.