Fighting In The War Room: A Movies And Pop Culture Podcast · Katey, Matt, Da7e and David

538 – The Bride!, undertone, Hoppers

March 11, 2026·1 hr 13 min·5 clips

Da7e explains why Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride is a 'mess we should be encouraging' with Jesse Buckley playing three characters.

The Fighting in the War Room team — Katie Rich, Matt Patches, David Ehrlich, and Dave Seven — opens with a warm-up about their favorite single-location movies (Presence, Mother, The Haunting of 1963, Dr. Strangelove) as a tie-in to the Undertone release. The hosts reflect on the sixth anniversary of COVID's early days and Tom Hanks' positive test marking the moment things became real. A listener review calling Matt Patches 'quasi-conservative and sexist' becomes a running thread of increasingly escalating in-jokes at Patches' expense. The main critical feature is The Bride: David Ehrlich previews it as something he had eagerly anticipated due to Maggie Gyllenhaal's track record with The Lost Daughter, Jessie Buckley (beloved since Wild Rose), and original music by Fever Ray, but could not see it due to book leave. Dave Seven did see it and delivers a nuanced defense: while he acknowledges why critics rejected it, he sees Gyllenhaal's ambition clearly. The film is set in 1935 (the same year as Universal's Bride of Frankenstein), begins with Mary Shelley narrating from nonexistence, and follows a version of Ida/The Bride played by Buckley with Christian Bale as Frankenstein, trading incoherence of story for stunning sequences where the two leads push their performances to the edge of bad and pull back in controlled ways. The episode also briefly covers Undertone (opening that week) and the documentary Hoppers.

As heard by us

A one-house-movie lightning round opens into loose, enjoyable talk about Presence, Mother, The Bride, and Undertone.

PlayNext starts with a brisk favorite-movies exercise centered on stories that mostly unfold in one house, then eases into a broader film conversation that touches Presence, Mother, The Bride, and Undertone.

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Why you'd press play

For when your movie talk should come with haunted houses and podcast nitpicks.

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