Daniel Nelson
I told a friend about The Difficult Bride, a Bangladeshi body horror film in which the betrothed woman experiences disturbing omens such as snakes and snails and weird skin manifestations as she undergoes a series of beauty treatments ahead of her fairytale wedding.
“The prospect of a woman developing a reptilian infestation in response to the horrors of marriage preparations sounds perfectly reasonable to me,” retorted my Dhaka friend. “A rather more dramatic manifestation of what many women must feel. I rather like the idea of bodily rebellion when all other forms of resistance have been exhausted.”
In a way, that’s the problem with the film, which is about the impending union of two young, attractive people from very rich families who live in what my aunt used to call “buttered comfort”.
The bride-to-be, Zaineen, chafes at her family’s, society’s, expectations, and her naive rebelliousness leads to a brush with the police, from which wealth saves her. In addition, whenever her mother puts a loving arm around her and asks “Happy?”, daughter nods but never says Yes.
Something is wrong, and it’s not the groom, Aarman, who is fit and xxxx, dashing and accommodating.
But still the creepy crawlies keep snaking into view, along with strange scratches and boils on her body.
A beautician, Minoti, implants more bad seeds by telling her about a client who died in the salon.
So it quickly seemed to me that the horror was in her head rather than from terrifying external happenings. The key was finding the cause of her extreme reaction.
There’s fun to be had along the way, however, in this lavish, colourful, often funny tale, with its occasional yuk and jump-cut shocks. When Zaineen strays out of her rich world or background TV shows fleeting shots of street protests, director Rubaiyat Hossain also gives us glimpses of other sides of Dhaka life.
The film doesn’t really dig deep enough into patriarchy and prejudice but the sudden ending is pure joy.