La Mariée du Diable

Beautifully done movie, nice landscapes, and seems true to the late 1600's in costuming. Yes, the characters get lost in their tangled relationships which makes it harder to follow the action. But it is such a very somber theme. Let us commend the filmmakers for revisiting this painful history in their country, for this history needs to be preserved so that we never go there again! The witchcraft trials in this film are almost contemporaneous with the 1692 Salem Witch Trials in New England.

Oh - languages spoken in the film are both Finnish and Swedish. The Åland Islands are an autonomous part of Finland, wherein 95% of the Åland population speaks Swedish as their first language (so says Wikipedia). There is a lot of Swedish spoken in this film. In fact, in one scene, someone is actually ordered to speak Swedish.

Devil's Bride, or Tulen morsian in Finnish, is based on the witch hunts that took place on the Åland Islands in the 17th century. A young woman named Anna Eriksdotter is an apprentice to a local herb woman. Things start to unravel when she falls for a handsome fisherman, who just happens to be married. And at the same time a new judge is sent to town to bring the wrath and fear of God into the countryfolk. And he almost immediately starts lashing against the old pagan habits followed by many. Including those of Valpuri, the aforementioned herb woman and Anna's adoptive mother.

Tulen morsian shines as a movie because of its commitment to the source material and its willingness to stick to real events. All the judged girls are named after real women, whose names can be found in the church records. The ending is also quite bleak, though handled with care and given a twist that makes it a bit more bearable, while in no way ruining it. The technical aspects also work rather well and it's a beautiful period drama, especially given the relatively modest budget.

Unfortunately, there are some flaws. Some of the actors are not quite as good as you'd hope, but that is to be expected, given that Finland and Sweden don't have that large of a pool to draw from. The bigger problem is the story, half of which seems to have ended up on the cutting room floor. There are more than a few story lines that are started but which are never finished. The relationship between Anna and the judge, for example. Goes absolutely nowhere.

Still, I'd recommend seeing this if the source material and the general idea interest you. It's well-made and kept together reasonably well, plus the main characters are very good.

I am a midwestern American who enjoys viewing films from other parts of the world. They are a refreshing change to what Hollywood has to offer.

If you can't enjoy anything but a Hollywood movie with a Hollywood ending, then this film is not for you. If you are willing to accept the fact that there exist people who are not Southern Californians with Hollywood lifestyles and viewpoints, then you may enjoy watching this well made period piece about people in another part of the world.

I gave it a 10 just because.

I kept putting off watching this movie because of some of the negative reviews. I'm not sure what's so polarizing about this film that makes it deserve such quotes as "quite possibly the worst movie in the history of cinema". I'm glad I finally watched it despite them; as usual, I found the exaggeratedly negative reviews totally off the mark of how I experienced this film.

Devil's Bride starts off slow, peaceful. It follows a teenage girl named Anna as she carelessly lusts after a married man in youthful ignorance. Don't let that fool you: this movie is not YA fare and it oftentimes shows a wider perspective of the village and its other inhabitants. One might feel at ease in the first half hour or so of this film, for the ignorance of the townspeople when it comes to the impending religious massacre is well-developed to set the scene. As Anna crosses the line with this married man and pieces for a witch hunt are set in motion in the village, however, the innocent exterior of this community is peeled away to reveal common abuse of women (sexual, physical) and the ultimate consequences that fall upon victims rather than perpetrators. Fingers are pointed, men accuse their victims to essentially quiet their voices, and heads start rolling.

True to history, this is a depressing and heart-breaking affair. There is no justice for these women who have no means of defending themselves against idiotic religious "witch tests" of the time (such as cutting open a woman's scar to see if it hurts, and if it doesn't, she's a witch, of course). All at once, this movie made me angry, upset, and ever-so-grateful to be a woman in modern times. Unlike another reviewer who stated Anna "deserved" her fate (which was concocted out of self-sacrifice by Anna for her wrongdoings, something not many adults would have the guts to do if it meant death in this day and age), Devil's Bride is so emotionally effective it made me feel for these flawed characters who were murdered simply FOR their flaws. In modern times, teenagers make stupid mistakes, and if they get punished at all it involves getting yelled at or their things taken away. In the times of witch hunts, the mistakes of youth have far more dire consequences. Such mistakes didn't make Anna horrible, in my opinion; they made her human, believable, and oh-so-tragic. I greatly enjoyed seeing this period from the perspective of a bumbling teenager; often we are led to believe evil people were the only ones pointing fingers at "witches", so it's easy to overlook the fact that there were likely many caught up in the hysteria who weren't evil, only misguided and ignorant.

One flaw some reviewers have called out about the movie are its gaps in story/relationship development, so I kept my eye out for this when watching and found it to be untrue. As for the fisherman's "disappearance" from the movie, this is explained by his leaving on another fishing trip at the 1 hour 22 minute mark during his wife's trial. Other friendships and relationships "dissolve" because many of the women are executed. A lot of the so-called inconsistencies can also be explained by the mentalities of different times. The fisherman (like other men) are shown to have qualms with the system and questions when it comes to the guiltiness of these women, but they are ultimately powerless (this internal struggle is seen the most with Karl's character). After all, when the established system is killing through so many people, it takes an outlandishly courageous person to even question it at the risk of your own life or livelihood. Is it any wonder this chaos lasted as long as it did?

Overall, I really enjoyed this movie and would recommend it to anyone interested in history's darkest and most ghastly times. The subject of witch hunts seem ever more relevant in the modern cancel culture; as always, we can avoid so much pain and sorrow if we learn from history.

Let's face it, movie reviews are all subjective. There is no such thing as an objective movie review because it's all about the tastes and they differ. There's no use dissing anyone's opinions.

This movie has high production values on every aspect but still it manages to be very sloppy. Its pacing is non-existent, it doesn't engage and touch when it should. It's also very hard to like the main character after she causes great pain to other woman. It's hard to have sympathy on that character when it was supposed to be the most likeable person in the film to sympathize with. In my opinion her fate was well earned.

Also the acting is mediocre, even spoken finnish is difficult to follow because of the strong swedish accent. I needed subtitles to make sense of what they were talking about. Better idea would have been to make them all speak swedish.

I was so happy that i never went to see this film on the cinema and paid nothing to watch it. It was such a waste of time that i was disappointed. Usually finnish movies aren't very good. Only Finns keep fussing about them while they don't usually get widely distributed (exception is Kaurismaki films).