“Rubaiyat does not seem interested in softening her ideas or making them more comfortable for the audience. She allows the film to become strange, disturbing, sensual, and confrontational when it needs to be”

The whole world seems to be divided by so many things. Countries, cities, societies, cultures, languages — everything keeps us apart. And yet, art has always found a way to rise above these divisions, reminding us that the world can also be a shared home. Art can travel from one place to another without a passport, and cinema is perhaps one of the clearest proofs of that. With Rubaiyat Hossain’s The Difficult Bride, a Bangladeshi film has travelled far beyond the borders of its own country. Its journey to Venice is not only a remarkable achievement for the filmmaker, but also a historic moment for Bangladeshi cinema. A film rooted in Dhaka is now reaching audiences from all over the world.
The Difficult Bride begins with a scene that feels instantly familiar. In contemporary Dhaka, a bride is getting ready for her wedding inside a beauty salon. Mirrors, beauty products, makeup, and all the rituals of bridal preparation surround her. Everything looks beautiful, ordinary, even comforting at first. But slowly, something else begins to emerge beneath that familiar surface.

At the centre of the story is Zaineen, a bride-to-be. As her wedding day comes closer, her body begins to behave in strange and disturbing ways. It is no longer simply the anxiety of an upcoming marriage. In the middle of the salon’s polished surroundings, lizards crawl across her body. Slow, slimy snails begin appearing on her skin and in the mirrors. Then come worms, snakes, and dead fish. Alongside them comes the mysterious presence of a bride who died in the past. The familiar rituals of marriage and beauty gradually turn into a surreal and deeply unsettling world of psychological horror, where Zaineen’s body and surroundings begin to speak for the rebellion taking place inside her.
One of the most fascinating things about the film is that its supernatural elements never feel separate from Zaineen’s inner world. Her body, her surroundings, and her mind slowly begin to speak the same language. As the film moves forward, it becomes difficult to tell what is actually happening and what may be coming from somewhere inside her. That uncertainty makes the horror even more effective.

The use of animals is particularly striking. The lizards, snails, worms, snakes, and dead fish are not there simply to frighten us. They seem to reflect Zaineen’s changing state of mind, her anxiety, and her growing discomfort with the world around her. Among them, the snails stay with us the most. Their slow, slimy movement inside a shiny and carefully maintained beauty salon feels completely out of place. And that is exactly what makes them so powerful. A beauty salon is a place where a woman’s body is shaped according to certain ideas of beauty. She is cleaned, prepared, arranged, and made presentable. The body is expected to become controlled and perfect. The snails bring in the opposite of that. They are slow, organic, messy, and impossible to fully control. They make the body feel alive in a way that cannot be neatly arranged. In a film about the expectations placed on women, this becomes a quietly powerful image.

The presence of the dead bride from the past is another important part of the film. We do not only hear about her; we see her. Whenever she appears, a particular piece of music accompanies her, almost as if the music itself carries her memory. These are some of the most atmospheric moments in the film. She does not feel like a conventional ghost. Instead, she feels like a story from the past that has remained trapped inside that place. Every new bride seems to bring the memory of the old one back with her.

The music inside the salon works beautifully in the same way. While the women are busy with their beauty rituals, classic, soft songs are almost always playing in the background. The music is calm, familiar, and strangely comforting. Yet it creates a beautiful contrast with what we are seeing on screen. The salon looks peaceful on the surface, while something deeply unsettling is happening underneath. 

There are also small details in Zaineen’s world that add another layer to the film. At one point, she draws the sixteenth Tarot card, which represents Chaos. She is also reading Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, a novel deeply concerned with female identity, social expectations, and psychological confinement. These details place Zaineen’s experience within a much longer history of women struggling against the roles imposed on them.

There is also something wonderfully bold about the way Rubaiyat Hossain approaches this film. In the context of Bangladeshi cinema, filmmakers often have to work with an invisible awareness of what might be considered too sensitive, too provocative, or simply too much. The fear of censorship, and the instinct to stay within familiar boundaries, can quietly shape the way stories are told. The Difficult Bride feels refreshingly free of that hesitation. Rubaiyat Hossain does not seem interested in softening her ideas or making them more comfortable for the audience. She allows the film to become strange, disturbing, sensual, and confrontational when it needs to be. That boldness leaves a strong mark on the entire film, and for me, it is one of its most exciting qualities. This is also what makes the title The Difficult Bride so interesting. Zaineen is “difficult” because she cannot simply perform the role expected of her. Her body begins to resist. The rituals that are supposed to prepare her for marriage slowly become unbearable. Rubaiyat Hossain turns this resistance into horror. Instead of telling another familiar story about a woman confronting patriarchy, she makes the woman’s body itself the centre of that conflict.

There is something beautiful in the contradiction of the film’s supernatural elements. The supernatural can be frightening, but it can also become a form of liberation. Zaineen’s body refuses to cooperate with the version of herself that is being created for her. What looks monstrous or ugly may therefore also be an act of rebellion. Her body is no longer something to be dressed and displayed for someone else’s gaze. It begins to act on its own terms.

The performance at the centre of this transformation is crucial. Zaineen Chowdhury Karim’s acting is one of the film’s strongest elements, especially because so much of the film depends on her physical expression. From the ordinary anxiety and hesitation of a bride-to-be to fear, discomfort, and eventually something almost otherworldly, she carries the transformation with great precision. The supporting performances, however, are not always as convincing. Some scenes feel slightly stiff, and at times this interrupts the atmosphere the film works so hard to create.

The cinematography works well with the story, although I felt it could have been stronger. The images support the film’s ideas, but there are not many shots that remain in the mind long after the film ends. The use of colour, in particular, could have been more daring and expressive, especially because the film relies so heavily on visual symbols. The dance sequences are beautiful, but they do not add much to the story. The same can be said about the screenplay. There are many wonderful ideas and striking images here, but in a few places the film explains its symbols a little too clearly instead of allowing them to speak for themselves.

Even with these limitations, The Difficult Bride remains an important film, especially within the context of Bangladeshi cinema. We have seen films about women, marriage, desire, and patriarchy before. But Rubaiyat Hossain places these familiar subjects inside a surreal and psychological framework that is still unusual in our cinema. Genre is not simply being used here for entertainment. Horror becomes a way of expressing fears and pressures that can be difficult to capture through realism alone. This is also what gives the film its international quality. The Difficult Bride does not try to present Bangladesh to international audiences as an exotic or mysterious place. Instead, it takes something deeply familiar — contemporary Dhaka, a beauty salon, marriage, family expectations, and the pressure to behave in a certain way — and transforms it through a distinctive cinematic language. The film does not hide its local identity in order to become international. It finds its international voice by remaining rooted in its own world.

The film’s journey beyond Bangladesh is already remarkable. The Difficult Bride has been selected for the Orizzonti Competition of the festival, making it the first Bangladeshi feature film to compete at Venice. It was selected as one of 14 projects from more than 1,200 applications for the first edition of the Fondazione Prada Film Fund. The fund supports independent films with artistic research, originality, and a strong cinematic vision, giving the project another important form of international recognition and support.

Women and the social structures that shape their lives have always been central to Rubaiyat Hossain’s cinema. With The Difficult Bride, she takes that concern somewhere even more surreal. The body becomes the centre of the film. And at a certain point, that same body becomes the source of resistance. The film begins with a bride being made beautiful. She is prepared, arranged, and transformed into a particular image for a particular day. But somewhere within that process, her body begins to refuse everything that is expected of it. Perhaps that is the film’s most powerful idea. Freedom does not always begin with speaking, fighting, or walking away. Sometimes, it begins with something much quieter.

Sometimes, it begins with the body simply saying no.