‘The Difficult Bride’ Review: A Haunted Bridal Parlor Drama with Untapped Potential

Rubaiyat Hossain’s atmospherically pent-up fourth feature “The Difficult Bride” is the latest of cinema’s reckonings with the beauty industry — having a glaring amount in common in terms of icky, oozing body horror visuals, a walls-closing-in sense of claustrophobia and a slippery downward spiral with another well-known cinematic treatise on the subject, “The Substance.” However, it has less to say about this notoriously toxic industry than it does about local social hierarchies. Set in a Dhaka beauty parlor, the privileged young woman of the film‘s title is a fascinating vehicle through which Hossain explores feminist intersectionality in Bangladesh — but the atmospheric, thematic potential of the film steadily peters out, leaving us with too few fresh conclusions to draw.

Feminist themes have been at the crux of the director’s four features to date. “Meherjaan” explored the Bangladesh Independence War through the female gaze; “Under Construction” was about a woman reconstructing her identity beyond the bounds of her marriage; and “Made in Bangladesh,” about female factory work unionization, was her answer of sorts to Britain’s “Made in Dagenham.”

That interest in class continues here, as cinematographer Leonor Teles’ camera luxuriates in the opulent textiles, cascades of fresh flowers, lightbulb-stippled mirrors and red and pink color-grading of the salon (filmed mostly within Hossain’s own home). These roving, tenderly lingering shots of silks and intricately embroidered fabrics are contrasted with guerilla-style camerawork capturing the external environs: Dhaka’s rundown streets peppered with the homeless, vendors and child beggars.

But from the start we know there is something is awry about the sanctified, haloed space of the salon. The rattle of a bride’s gold earring or the rasp of straightener steam through a bride’s hair takes on a panic-inducingly eerie quality thanks to Marie-Clotilde Chery’s chilling sound design. Meanwhile, Jim Williams’ score effectively undermines the beauty parlour as a place of pre-wedding excitement and anticipation with discordant electro-pop — just ever so slightly suggesting that nothing good is set to happen here.

To top it all off, a dazzlingly beautiful spectral bridal figure (model Sunerah Binte Kamal) apparates before one of the mirrors — and it turns out that she is one of the salon’s former clients, since deceased, still plaguing its mirror-lined halls.

As silly as the plotline may sound on paper, “The Difficult Bride” manages to be convincingly creepy while steering clear of schlockiness, with a couple of proper jumpscares to boot. Hossain seeks to subvert the well-worn trope of cursed bride in South Asian cinema, who here torments the salon’s latest bride-to-be, Zai (newcomer Zaineen Chowdhury Karim). She is a rather spoilt, Western-educated aspiring author with an American accent which sticks out like a sore thumb.

Zai leads a kind of ghostly existence in her own right, listlessly lounging in her diva-worthy four poster bed, scrolling her feed of weight loss tips TikToks and surveilling Dhaka from behind the blacked-out windows of chauffeur-driven SUV while airpods blast the lyrics — a little too pointedly — “I live my life acting like I’m in a movie” into her eardrums.

‘The Difficult Bride’Venice Film Festival

It’s an airbrushed life of privilege which Zai is under pressure to keep improving on in the lead up to her wedding, about which she seems to be getting cold feet. At the salon, the impossibly flawless-looking manager (Azmeri Haque Badhon) finds granular fault with Zai’s body, from stretchmarks to pore imperfections, signing her up to a gruelling program of treatments. Hossain, meanwhile, subjects us to a checklist of symbolic imagery and stomach-churning body horror galore: chopped meat, bloody stubbed toenails, needles pricking cheeks, blood injections, and pus-spewing spots.

As Zai’s doubts about the wedding fester, scratches begin to appear on her legs, apparently the work of the phantom bride, while the menacing of this spirit produces blemishes on her skin. The supernatural drama is also cluttered with heavy-handed animal imagery, from a severed cow’s head to snails gleefully skidding their way down the soles of patented red heels — all of which serves little purpose except to point out that the surface-level beauty of Zai’s life is not all that it seems.

The only route out of Zai’s princess in a tower situation is Minoti (Reekita Nondine Shimu), a working-class spa worker at Zai’s constant beck and call, who she strongarms into hooking her up with weed. Though sympathetic to the onslaught of treatments Zai is facing, the meek, protective Minoti warns her of the repercussions of rebellion. It’s in their dynamic that Hossain begins to unpick the double standards for upper and working class Bangladeshi women — the relative freedom that Zai’s affluence allows her while Minoti can only dream of becoming a bride herself one day. Zai’s internal struggle is unfolding against the much broader turmoil of student protests and rising news reports of violence against women, creating a sense of imperilment in the city.

There would have been room for a rich exploration of beauty and gender here, but by the end of “The Difficult Bride” this messy thematic territory is disappointingly smoothed over. Hossain ties up the fate of her complicated protagonist with a neat bow, leaving too many unanswered questions about the backstory and topics raised. Technically, it’s an accomplished, if slight feature — but a shame its conclusion was smoothed over as seamlessly as foundation.

Grade: C

“The Difficult Bride” premiered at the 2026 Venice Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.