Yes, possession plays a central role in The Bride!, though perhaps not in the way you might expect going in. Speaking from the afterlife, Mary Shelley explains that she has a story she wanted to tell as a follow-up to Frankenstein, but was prevented from doing so by her own death. To tell it, she possesses Ida, a woman living in 1936 Chicago, who then recounts the events of the film while in her trance.
Read more about the plot of The Bride!
What makes this particularly interesting is that Jessie Buckley plays both Mary Shelley and Ida, the murdered woman who is later reanimated to become the Bride. It is a dual role that sits at the very heart of the film’s structure, blurring the line between author and creation in a way that feels very intentional on Director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s part.
So yes, the Bride is possessed, but the film uses possession as more of a storytelling device than a horror mechanic. It is Gyllenhaal’s way of framing the entire narrative through the perspective of Mary Shelley herself, giving the original author a kind of posthumous agency over her own legacy. It is one of the more ambitious and, for some viewers, divisive creative choices in an already very divisive film.
READ MORE: The Bride! (2026), 10 Movies Like The Bride!
