The Difficult Bride

“Happy?” asks the bridal salon owner (Azmeri Haque). She’s talking to soon-to-be-wed Bangladeshi Zaineen (Zaineen Chowdhury Karim), who has been primped and polished, sculpted and made-up to within an inch of her life. That process forms the bedrock of Rubaiyat Hossain’s latest film, which mixes psychodrama with a smattering of the perfection-seeking related body horror that has been on trend recently, in the likes of The Substance and The Ugly Sister, while dressing in the whisper of a ghost story. The question of happiness, meanwhile, echoes throughout.

And on the face of it Zaineen ought to be happy. A spoiled rich kid, she has little more to do with her life than read poetry (Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, with Hossain underlining the feminist point) and prepare for her wedding to Aarman (Dameer Khan), who is good looking, well mannered and well off. Hossain – whose film is the first Bangladeshi movie to screen at Venice – previously considered a woman in a seemingly perfect life in Under Construction, and returning to the theme here she largely strips out the patriarchal element to consider, culturally, what women are doing to themselves.

In that vein, it’s not Zaineen’s relationship with Aarman, per se, that Hossain is seeking to question, but the process towards the wedding Zaineen is enduring. The idea of looking at your best on your ‘big day’ has plenty of international resonance – everyone knows a bride-to-be who was determined to lose weight – but it is seen to be taken close to extremes in Bangladesh. The salon owner wastes little time in listing Zaineen’s catalogue of shortcomings, from her need to shed some pounds to “fair polishing” her darker areas of skin and invasive PRP (platelet-rich plasma) treatment that sees her own blood injected back into her face. When she says, “Enjoy your treatments,” it sounds more like a threat than a promise.

Hossain keeps the mood claustrophobic. At home, Zaineen is almost always attended by Minoti (Reekita Nondine Shimu), an assistant from the salon who she badgers into buying cigarettes for her in between treatments – a task that carries a certain risk due to the social stigma of women smoking. Outside the home, Zaineen is almost always shadowed by a chauffeur, so it’s no wonder her preoccupation leads to bad sleep. Hossain previously used dream sequences in Under Construction to mirror inner turmoil and she steps them up a gear here as we see a bride (Sunerah Binte Kamal), who died on her wedding day.

The writer/director notches up the disturbing imagery with quick cutaways from luxurious fabrics and jewellery to lizards, snails and worms. Zaineen also starts scratching herself in the night and begins to feel her skin crawling. There are those who might find the body horror element too restrained for their taste. But the way Hossain uses imagery and Marie-Clotilde Chery’s sound design to make even the loveliest fabrics (sumptuous production and costume design from Jonaki Bhattacharya) feel queasily viscera-like is impressive.

Karim’s performance is crucial, her anxiety about herself and the pressures on her not making her any more empathetic to the challenges the lower class Minoti faces. This class difference is one of the film’s strongest elements, as we see how Zaineen’s worries over her look are insignificant in a wider scheme of a rising tide of violence against women even if the writer/director’s news inserts feel somewhat on the nose.

Hossain might not quite follow through on some of the deeper issues raised in favour of giving Zaineen’s story a neat trajectory and conclusion but this is nevertheless an atmospheric tale that, while retaining cultural specificity, generates universal resonance.

Reviewed on: 08 Sep 2026