The Bride! | 2026
Although set in 'Chicago', New York and stops in between, the film was made entirely in New York with a little New Jersey. Find out exactly where.
The story kicks off in 'Chicago', but it's all filmed in New York State (plus one location in New Jersey). The restaurant with its row of mirrors where Ida (Jessie Buckley) is drinking with the associates of mobster Lupino (Zlatko Buric) before she gets possessed by Mary Shelley (also Buckley) is venerable Brooklyn chop house Gage & Tollner, 372 Fulton Street, Downtown Brooklyn.
Dating from 1879, the restaurant is a designated landmark whose past clientele has included the likes of Gilded Age businessman and philanthropist 'Diamond' Jim Brady, writer Truman Capote, plus entertainers Fanny Brice, Jimmy Durante, and Mae West. The restaurant closed for a while following the pandemic, but it's now back.
Its period ambiance was previously seen on screen in Woody Allen's 1999 Sweet and Lowdown with Sean Penn.
Ida and Lupino... it seems the names are a nod to actor and pioneering director Ida Lupino (and only the second woman to be admitted to the Director's Guild).
The exterior of the mansion of Dr Euphronius (Annette Bening) at "7810 South Wells Street, Chicago" where Frank (Christian Bale) turns up demanding the doctor create a mate for him, is the 1898 Carroll Mansion, 86 Riverside Drive on the corner of West 81st Street on Manhattan's Upper West Side.
Having remained pretty much intact through the years, the five-story mansion was put on sale a few years ago for $8 million and is now private apartments. Disappointingly it does not house a glass-windowed laboratory – that circular pavilion tower on the corner is real enough but the windows were added digitally.
That lab apart, the mansion's interior is in Upstate New York. It's Alder Manor, 1097 North Broadway, in Yonkers. No stranger to the screen, Alder Manor was also the estate where Russell Crowe, as mathematician John Nash, drops mail off in Ron Howard's 2001 A Beautiful Mind, as well as being featured in Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums, Crocodile Dundee and Mona Lisa Smile. It's not generally open to visitors but you can hire it as an events / conference space or for weddings.
The mansion's grounds include an open-air Greek-style theatre, which which stood in for the graveyard from which Euphronius and Frank exhume the body of Ida.
Frank (as he's know) is a diehard romantic and a fan of movie musicals, particularly the sophisticated extravaganzas of matinee idol Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal). The picture house where Frank dreamily envisages himself in top hat and tails is, surprisingly, New York's Centennial Memorial Temple, the main auditorium of what was the Salvation Army's HQ at 132 West 14th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues in north Greenwich Village.
The 1,350-seat theatre opened in 1930 to honour the hundredth birthday of the Army's founder William Booth, at the behest of his daughter Evangeline.
After Ida is successfully revived, Frank wastes no time taking her along too and afterwards on to a decadent and anachronistically punkish nightclub.
This is New Jersey's moment to shine. The cavern-like nightspot is the disused Cedar Street Subway Tunnel, which runs for two blocks from Washington Street beneath Cedar Street in Newark.
No longer used by streetcars or buses, the tunnel was taken over by entrepreneur Amer Hanini and is now used as a film and TV location. You can see it's gaping entrance (behind a fence) on the east side of Washington Street between Warren Street and Raymond Boulevard.
When Frank violently sees off a couple of obnoxious punks here, the pair are caught on camera. Forced to flee 'Chicago', they board a freight train.
The railway scenes were filmed on the stretch of line alongside Esopus Creek, at Cold Brook Station on Cold Brook Road, just north of New York State Route 28A in Boiceville – "Gateway to the Catskills". The station itself, which once served the New York Central Railroad's Catskill Mountain Branch, is now used as a club house by a local hunting and fishing club.
Winding up in Manhattan, the streetwise Frank shrewdly collects pennies thrown into the Tisch Fountain in Washington Square Park, Greenwich Village, overlooked by the landmark Washington Square Arch familiar from countless films.
Meanwhile, detectives Myrna Malloy (Penélope Cruz) and Jake Wyles (Peter Sarsgaard) are on the trail of the pair. The roadside diner where Malloy realises the couple are headed to New York is the Wythe Diner which stood at 225 Wythe Avenue at North Third Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
The 1968 diner had previously appeared in Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street and Barry Sonnenfeld's Men In Black III but the restaurant it housed closed in 2018. Although the lot was sold, the diner has been saved. In 2025, it was picked up by crane and transported on a flatbed truck to continue its life in the borough as a screen star at Steiner Studios, in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
There's a bit more anachronistic fun when Ida and Frank duck into a 'Times Square' cinema showing a 3-D horror movie, almost 20 years before they became the fad.
This is a real gem though sadly we don't see enough of it on screen. It's the amazing Tishman Auditorium of The New School, 66 West 12th Street, Manhattan – founded in 1919 as The New School for Social Research with a mission dedicated to academic freedom and intellectual inquiry and a home for progressive thinkers. The auditorium itself dates from 1931 and it’s claimed that people were astonished by the design. I’m guessing people still are.
Spooked discover a pair of real-life 'monsters' among them, the audience follows the old tradition, chasing the outsiders out onto the street and through Manhattan's Financial District, along Beaver Street and Hanover Street.
They evade the mob by diving into a doorway on Exchange Place (which is alongside the bank featured in Spike Lee's Inside Man) to find themselves gatecrashing a swanky party – hosted by none other that Frank's idol Ronnie Reed.
Don't go searching for the glamorous ballroom where there's a cheeky nod to Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein as everyone bursts into Puttin' On The Ritz, and Ida shoots a cop. This is an elaborate studio set.
Fleeing again, the pair suddenly find themselves way to the north north on 12th Avenue, at 135th Street in Manhattanville (sometimes known as West Harlem) alongside the Hudson River.
The flight of steps on which Wyles is standing when he recognises Ida leads up to Riverside Drive. He freezes and allows the pair to scuttle back south along 12th Avenue beneath the arches of the raised section of Riverside Drive.
If you're a location tourist visiting the area, head up the steps to 135th Street. Just a block east stands the old Claremont Theatre building which was featured in Ridley Scott's 2007 American Gangster, with Denzel Washington.
Pictures of Ida in the newspapers alert mob boss Lupino to the fact that she's not just still alive but threatening to spill the beans on his criminal empire.
The social club where he puts out a hit on her is Sam’s Restaurant, 238 Court Street, Cobble Hill in Brooklyn. This restaurant really does date from the 1930s and still looks like it, with retro lighting, red leather banquettes, wood panelling and celebrity photos adorning the walls. Fortunately for sensitive diners, there are no jars full of human tongues.
The 'Ideal Motel', in which Malloy and Wyles briefly stop on their cross-country journey and Malloy realises their quarry are now heading to 'Niagara', is the Cave Mountain Motel, 10978 NY-23, Windham, up in the Catskills, New York State.
By now, Ida and Frank have acquired a blue Cadillac and are driving through the cornfields of Caumsett State Park, 25 Lloyd Harbor Road, Huntington, New York State – which is where the barn in which they briefly stop is sited.
The historic park, occupying a scenic peninsula which extends into Long Island Sound, was the main location for the 2025 Netflix series Sirens, with Julianne Moore.
When the twosome are pulled over by the cops for speeding, and the handsy cop who frisks Ida gets inevitably more than he bargained for, they're on Crest Lane in Ancramdale, a hamlet on State Route 82 in southeast Columbia County.
On reaching 'Niagara', Wyles breaks down and reveals the truth about Ida, resigning from the job and handing over his badge to Malloy. Far from the real Falls, this was filmed on Staten Island at Snug Harbor Cultural Center, 1000 Richmond Terrace on the north coast where the Kill Van Kull strait separates Staten Island from Bayonne, New Jersey.
Snug Harbor is an 83-acre campus originally built in the 19th century as a retirement home for sailors. With around two dozen architecturally significant buildings, it's now designated a National Historic Landmark District.
Malloy continues her investigation alone, adroitly getting vital information from the staff at a gas station while the clueless cops are getting briefed at the now-closed Accord Servicenter on US Route 209 in Accord, Ulster County. This had to be dressed for the period including the temporary addition of those old-style gas pumps.
The drive-in cinema where Malloy finally catches up with the couple was constructed at Old Bethpage Village Restoration, 1303 Round Swamp Road, Old Bethpage, in the heart of Long Island.
We don't see much of the faithfully recreated pre-Civil War village set on over 200 acres of farmland houses more than two dozen original homes and buildings, relocated from across the region and carefully restored, but you may get to see more of it in TV series The Gilded Age.
There's a drive back to the movie's version of 'Chicago' for the finale, which takes place at back Euphronius's mansion on Riverside Drive, Manhattan.
* Thanks to Tommy South and to the New Jersey Motion Picture Commission for their assistance
