In 1930s Chicago, a lonely Monster seeks out a radical scientist with one desperate request, to build him a companion who can share his endless existence. The experiment draws on the body of a murdered young woman, and when she awakens with flashes of another life still clinging to her, the plan immediately slips beyond anyone’s control. What he wants sounds simple, almost tender, but the science behind it is anything but innocent work.

Brought back as the Bride, she refuses to become the obedient partner the Monster imagined. Curious, defiant and hungry for experience, she pushes into the city’s speakeasies, dance halls and criminal underworld, while her growing bond with the Monster veers between tenderness, resentment and a wild, unpredictable attraction that surprises them both. She renames herself, chooses her own pleasures and refuses to apologise for wanting far more than survival.

Their existence cannot stay hidden for long. Scientists, detectives and powerful men who see the reanimated pair as property, threat or opportunity begin closing in, and the Bride’s fragments of memory raise painful questions about the woman she was and the crime that ended her first life in violence. A crusading detective and a scandal-hungry press soon turn the couple’s freedom into front-page sensation across Chicago.

Maggie Gyllenhaal reimagines the classic story as a punk-spirited Gothic romance, led by Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale. Equal parts love story, horror tale and story of self-invention, the film gives its heroine a voice, a temper and a will of her own, turning a famous monster myth into something thrillingly alive. Shot in striking, expressionistic tones, it feels both lovingly old-fashioned and thrillingly, defiantly modern at once throughout, and it lingers long afterwards.

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