20 Recent Movie Scenes NOBODY Saw Coming

14. Mary Shelley Possesses Ida - The Bride!

The marketing for Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride! played things rather coy with its early big reveal, that Frankenstein author Mary Shelley is actually a character in the film herself, and also played by Jessie Buckley no less.

At the start of the film, Shelley speaks to us from the afterlife, monologuing that she had another story she wanted to tell after Frankenstein, at which point she suddenly takes possession of Buckley's protagonist Ida, a woman living in 1936 Chicago.

As a result, throughout the film, Ida has bizarre, theatrical outbursts as Shelley, her accent shifting from American to English for a moment as she waxes poetic before returning to her regular self.

It's truly odd stuff, and doesn't really make a whole lot of sense even within the context of the upfront framing device. Buckley certainly tries to do justice to Gyllenhaal's off-the-wall vision here, though many evidently saw it as just weird-for-weird 's-sake.