TIFF 51: “The Difficult Bride” takes body horror to the bridal salon

by Cláudio Alves

Women are often called difficult when they’re just standing up for themselves, refusing mistreatment, expressing anxiety openly and unmasked. When it comes to the matter of weddings and the cottage industry built around them, we can even point to the term "bridezilla," which came to be as a way to mock some of these so-called difficult women whose transgressions are often nothing of the sort. In Rubaiyat Hossain’s The Difficult Bride, Zai both fits and doesn’t fit the descriptor the film’s title imposes on her. After all, she’s a bright young woman marrying the man she loves and continuing her studies in the hopes of a golden future ahead. This Bangladeshi drama is quite forthcoming about how many of her inevitable issues arise from social pressures, and how her self-image collapses in slow motion as gendered expectations demand.

That being said, she is haunted by visions of wild beasts encroaching upon her, as well as a mysterious figure, perchance a monster from the beyond or the product of a fractured mind falling apart. So, “complicated” might be more generous monicker than “difficult.” Regardless, she’s certainly something outside the norm, a cursed bride out of South Asian horror tradition, slipping into madness and pulling the film along with her…

Right from the start, we’re made to understand Zai’s subjectivity as one deeply focused on perception and fitting the correct image. Moreover, it’s obvious how much that is forced upon the bride by outside forces. Arms that can’t be too flabby, or it’ll be shameful to expose them, become a matter of controversy during a dress fitting, for instance. Hossain’s camera also weaponizes the sharpness of her photography to heighten the perception of skin texture, risking the dehumanizing grotesque. And these anxieties are not just about Zai’s relationship with her body. They extend outward, sometimes viciously articulated in DP Leonor Teles’ lensing.

Consider how the camera follows Zai’s gaze on others, how implied judgment might make her complicit in the very social order that keeps harming her, whether she recognizes it as harmful or not. When this intersects with class issues, it can become quite uncomfortable, as when Zai’s eye hones in on flaws in those whose services she enjoys, like the blemish on a rickshaw man’s leg. For those less disquieted by ideas than by sights, The Difficult Bride has plenty of those, too. Indeed, it invites comparisons to The Substance and The Ugly Stepsister, among other recent body-horror works that tackle the beauty industry in their gory social critique. 

Scratches down her legs are one thing, but then come rashes and wandering bumps, alive beneath the surface of her skin, swellings that ooze pus, nails bitten down to raw flesh, and more. Influenced by local folklore and one of her beautician’s old wives’ tales, Zai even begins to suspect she’s being haunted by ancient forces attacking her, a modern woman. In one particular sequence, Hossain seems to dispel the possibility of the actual supernatural, cutting between the creature’s claws on a sleeping Zai and her unconscious self-harm, body twitching, hands attacking itchy skin until it bleeds. So, it’s all in her head? And if so, is it just the monster or the beautiful apparitions, too?

You see, though The Difficult Bride expands its narrative far beyond its confines, a luxurious beauty parlor remains a central location and a source of distress. Dark feelings come disguised as the comfort and genuine concern of professionals caring for their client while, in reality, profiting from insecurities they help cultivate. Within its walls, the ghost of a past bride sometimes appears, either through memories or dreams, or as a stranger lost in the crowd, an impossible reflection looking back from the mirror. Her inhuman perfection and presentation of traditional femininity can be the most frightening sight of all, especially when she appears to be offering tenderness toward the living. Her grace is harder to accept than aggression.

The Difficult Bride has a talent for introducing strong concepts like these and letting them peter out. At times, one almost wonders if it was meant to be a short, unsteadily expanded to feature length. Regardless, its most interesting element, the strongest concept of the lot, has to be Zai’s character herself. Specifically, how unsympathetic she’s allowed to be, a spoiled princess compared to many of the people she passes in her daily routine. Educated abroad, marrying for love yet still moving upward in society through said marriage, she’s plagued by capricious self-obsession and a grating American accent that further isolates her from others. She’s not the perfect victim for a horror movie nightmare. 

Perfect victims don’t exist, on or off-screen, but few films so emphatically reject the notion. Sadly, Hossain can be timid about this side of his heroine, and actress Zaineen Chowdhurry Karim shies away from accentuating it, too. In some regards, it can feel as if the filmmakers are afraid of alienating the audience after putting that enticing possibility on the table. Since the newcomer shares her name with the character, inviting notions of Zai as her fictionalized self, some caution is understandable, and the skeptical viewer might be persuaded to offer her some grace. If only this didn’t feel so self-sabotaging. So much so that The Difficult Bride’s denouement feels unearned and abrupt.

A non-ending, it’s played with far too little intensity by a novice performer mechanically going through the motions when this should be the culmination of her character arc. When it counts, this social critique with a commendable feminist message cowers, backing into a corner of half-measures and wasted potential. There’s not even genre-specific bad taste to be indulged in, Midnight Madness style – which makes its inclusion in TIFF’s Centrepiece rather than the more horror-forward section quite sensible. Sometimes, a bit of bad taste wouldn’t come amiss, for tasteful body horror rarely hits the mark. Alas, the most you’ll get out of The Difficult Bride on that front are its comical music cues, full of lyrics that seem to mock Zai, kicking her when she’s down for a taste of cruelty to go along with the wedding cake.

The Difficult Bride had its world premiere in Venice, and it will have two additional TIFF screenings on September 17 and 19.