Dead Bride

The longstanding Italian tradition of making horror films in English with female leads and over-egged scores and attractive cinematography and incoherent plots is alive and well in the 2020s, or so it would seem from Francesco Picone’s latest effort. Dead Bride sees a woman, her husband and their baby move into the house which she has inherited from her father, who recently died by suicide. Having been abandoned by her father at the age of nine, Alyson (Jennifer Mischiati) has had lifelong mental health problems which are all the more worrying due to the severe illness which troubled her mother. She’s coping pretty well for a new mother but is aware of her limits and smart enough to speak up when she needs help. When husband Richard (Christoph Hülsen) announces out of the blue that he’s going away on a work trip, she shudders at the thought of being without him in a place full of disturbing associations.

Well she might. As she begins to witness strange events, she flashes back to the troubled dreams of her childhood. Is she experiencing visions or is her mental health declining? In keeping with the aforementioned tradition, it’s pretty clear early on that there’s a bit of both going on, but we’re placed firmly on Alyson’s side as she tries to uncover the secrets of her father’s life and find a means of resolving her problems. This process involves bringing in a priest (Sean James Sutton) and later an expert in the occult (Douglas Dean, the only person present with a shred of acting talent). The former is already familiar with something of her family history. The latter delivers on the bells and whistles required for an exorcism film, and also carries around a special marble which, in the film’s most genuinely worrying moment, he considers giving to the baby as a toy.

Picone has made five films, four of them with the word ‘dead’ in the title. He seems to have written this script himself without an native English speaker to proofread it, and with the English natives amongst his actors unwilling or unable to make the necessary changes. Most of his errors are minor but they still make it hard to suspend disbelief, especially when combined with some palpably awful acting work. The result is curiously charming: a film which hasn’t been dubbed but, if one closes one’s eyes, sounds as though it has. There are lots of flimsily justified big emotional moments and the string-heavy score is similarly over the top, adding to the feeling that this some lost trashy treasure from the Seventies and not a serious film made today.

Whether or not you warm to the film is largely going to depend on how you relate to that kind of material. In conventional terms, there is little to admire, though bits of it do manage to look pretty. The story is incredibly predictable but reasonably well structured and paced as far as the haunting subgenre goes. At a technical level it’s better than one would expect given its failings elsewhere, but there are some odd editing decisions. What can definitely be said in its favour is that it a world of bland copycat filmmaking (thanks Netflix) it has a distinctive personality, and you will remember it for a while – just not necessarily for the right reasons.