The Difficult Bride Review: Rubaiyat Hossain’s Stilted Psychological Horror Is Too Timid About Female Transgression

Leading Bangladeshi filmmaker Rubaiyat Hossain is a fascinating voice with brave, brilliant ideas. Premiering in Orizzonti Competition, her new film, The Difficult Bride, comes with massive expectations. It’s billed as a historic selection, the first-ever Bangladeshi film to land a Venice competitive slot. On top of that, Hossain has repeatedly described it as a passion project, an idea that has been with her for two decades. She has honed and shaped it over many years, taking it through notable labs and grabbing prestigious grants. So, it’s a real mystery to find the eventual shape the film has resulted in as so terribly undercooked, unconvincing and painfully strained.

The Dhaka-set psychological fable trails Zaineen (Zaineen Chowdhury Karim) as she braces for her wedding rituals. The film emerges as a weeklong plunge into the preparations while the bride’s beautification is ensured. Hossain understands the sheer bodily violence, the cruel erasures and impositions involved, the invasion upon a woman’s being as she’s put under the grinder of social expectation. A psychological drama of such fibre demands a certain mystery, an opacity lending itself to the elusive, the lyrical and unnerving dimensionality. But what you get is a schematic rendition peddling exasperating bluntness. The misjudgement of tone emanates from the kernel of the dialogues which dash toward corny, obvious extremes.

The film opens with the application of the accoutrements: lipstick, earrings, bangles, ornate necklace, flowers pinned to hair. The adorning is elaborate, limning the entire film. It provokes a disquiet within her. She can’t quite settle into the various makeover trials. Discomfort jumps just under the surface of her skin, aching to jut out. Zai is from a wealthy family and her mother expects her to be an uncomplaining fixture at the Mayfair parlour for the entire gamut. Neither does the incessant shading of colourism hurled at the dark-skinned Zai skip notice. The parlour head (Azmeri Haque Badhon) underlines with grave concern Zai’s stretch marks, the condition of her underarms, calling for urgent weight loss. Her single refrain, “a bride must be patient”, is emphasised for Zai to internalise.

However, Zai is terrified, a flighty bundle of nerves. This bodily discomfort manifests in peculiar encounters and visions. Lizards and their severed parts are a key visual choice. Other slimy creatures skulk. Snakes peek. An indelible moment has a snail curling into a scarlet stiletto. The news too brings its own clutch of horrors. The film alludes to the July Uprising that swept Bangladesh in 2024, toppling Sheikh Hasina’s reign. However, the nods feel too pat and generic as a social context marker. Instead, it’s the unsettling sound design, hewn through a serration of insect sounds, that works overtime to fill in for the woolly script.

The Difficult Bride is clouded on a fundamental level. A lack of visual, emotional and spiritual clarity limits its possibilities, hacks away at probable intensity. The film relies wholly on Karim to convey a splintering psychological reality. It’s a tall ask, with Karim often veering to being too mannered. For the unravelling to cut deep, the psychological detailing must be fine, credible and evocative. But Hossain’s screenplay is too sketchy to build on a sense of internal landscape. The writing gets so mind-numbingly literal that, of course, there must be a shot of Zai reading Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, the definitive book on crushing patriarchal expectations. Along with DP Leonor Teles, Hossain has these stabs at uncanny imagery that just feel too distended and patchy to be effective. Where’s the visceral edge? Where’s the spiking touch of sensing something nasty lurking at the corner?

Zaineen wrestles with an inner churn. She wonders aloud why she feels so rocky when it’s supposed to be a peaceful, happy time. The Difficult Bride struggles to situate the undercurrents central to such a tale. Mayfair is haunted by an urban legend. The spirit of a bride who killed herself in its premises lingers, intruding upon Zai’s psyche, laying siege to not just her dreams but her waking consciousness. It appears to her alone, as if summoning a warning which she must heed before it’s too late. But this strand exposes another sorely pressing inability.

The Difficult Bride is unsure and cursory in tracing its heroine’s conflicts and dilemmas. There’s also the gnawing aspect of her addiction, which pulls her to uncharted territory. The single approach of pushing the bodily unease around beauty regimens never quite coalesces into a more expansive, emotionally coherent dive into what she’s chafing at. The question of privilege which undermines her desire for independence is left in the lurch. This becomes especially unavoidable in a bunch of deliberately pointed scenes between Zai and the parlour assistant, Minoti (an effortless, scene-stealing Rikita Nondine Shimu). Zai gets a much-needed reality check from Minoti, a reprimand. Shimu calls out her privilege, the mess she has made of her life despite getting it all. Zai sees the wealth and socioeconomic access she has at her disposal as claustrophobic. Every movement of hers is monitored by her family.

The problem with The Difficult Bride is the writing frequently hinges toward expository instead of suggestive. The synthetic construction siphons the film off any palpable disruptiveness. Hossain fumbles in setting a mood for the film. Shooting off an enticing idea, The Difficult Bride turns meandering and underbaked.

I kept wishing for the knife to twist within my gut. That sensation never arrives. Hossain tries to explore and probe yet there’s a rush, a jarring distance. The cloistering beauty standards, which raze women to the point of annihilation, are an easy thematic crutch that folds not always smoothly into the other character-driven strands. An abruptness between one scene and the next doesn’t allow dread to crack the surface. A film is perfectly licensed to leave loose ends. But this one leaves its many thematic threads ajar to the point of grating cluelessness.