Maggie Gyllenhaal
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With The Bride!, Maggie Gyllenhaal Clumsily Exhumes 200 Years of Zombie Girls
Whether Doctor Frankenstein likes it or not, the zombie story has always belonged to women. Ever since teenaged political radical Mary Shelley (daughter of feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft) poured her maternal anguish into the party game ghost story that eventually became Frankenstein, this cultural lodestar has come heavy with feminine, not to mention feminist, valences. Perhaps it’s no wonder, then, that when Elsa Lanchester rose from the dead in 1935, screaming her way off the slab and quickly back into the grave again in James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein, she herself birthed countless generations of rictus rebel daughters in under […]
by Payton McCarty-Simas on Mar 18, 2026 -
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Monster Mash
In the opening beats of The Bride!, the second feature written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, the ghost of Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley) mutters to herself from some dark corner of the subconscious ether. She rasps about the sequel to her most iconic work, Frankenstein, that she never got to write before she died in 1851. What would this hypothetical book be, she wonders: “Is it a horror story, a ghost story, or, most frightening of all, a love story?” What follows is a cat-and-mouse road movie, a jewel-toned Jazz Age thriller, a romantic caper following Frankenstein’s monster—who goes by […]
by Greta Rainbow on Mar 9, 2026 -
Interior Spaces: Writer/Director Maggie Gyllenhaal on The Lost Daughter
There is a moment early in The Lost Daughter, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s extraordinary debut film as writer/director/transgressive character whisperer. Leda (Olivia Colman) is on a solo summer vacation in Greece, lost in a reverie, walking on a rocky path. Then, something—a pinecone? a slingshot?—falls from above and pierces her back. Is this intrusion a piercing of persona, of psychic armor? Is it a portent of indignities to come, or perhaps, is it the shock to the system that triggers Leda’s ensuing momentum of memory? The occurrence speaks to everything and perhaps nothing at all. Leda is a British-born academic who has […]
by Madeleine Molyneaux on Jan 18, 2022
