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It’s Alive! Or Is It?

As a new Hollywood version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein comes to the big screen – with a feminist twist – Jake Arnott considers what the 1818 novel can teach us about our AI future

Jessie Buckley plays Ida, a dead 1930s Chicago flapper brought back to life, in ‘The Bride!’
Photo: Pictorial Press

‘As of April 2026,” reads the Wikipedia entry  for a list of films featuring Frankenstein’s monster, “a body of 480 known feature films, 243 short films, 103 TV series, and 413 TV episodes feature some version or interpretation of the character Frankenstein’s monster, first created by Mary Shelley in her 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus”.

That’s some body of work.

The latest addition to this deathless corpus is Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! starring recent Oscar winner Jessie Buckley as a fiercely feminist version of the monster’s putative consort. Though this bold and wonderfully garish discourse on body autonomy was a spectacular box-office failure, the hunger to add to this list of creative reanimations shows no sign of abating. 

Machine Yearning: From God to Aliens to Chatbots – The Metaphysics of Loneliness

For those of us old enough to remember the Apollo missions, the sight of Artemis II blasting off towards the Moon may have brought back something a bit more complicated than Space Age tristesse or déjà vu.
Peter Jukes

The Politics of Loneliness

Lonely hurts. It hurts at the edges. The edges of the day, if you wake and fall asleep with no one: unwanted.
Jay Griffiths