Bury the Bride (2023)

June (Scout Taylor-Compton) is getting married soon–and she and her closest friends have traveled to the middle of nowhere to celebrate for a bachelorette weekend. When her fiance, David (Dylan Rourke), and his friends show up to crash the party things get crazy. Bury the Bride is a story of love, marriage, and survival in the most typical and usual ways you’ve ever seen.

There’s no hiding the fact that Bury the Bride is a horror film–it establishes itself as such almost immediately using a series of techniques that have been employed in horror films from the beginning. Isolation plays a pivotal role in how viewers receive the film–and while there are a handful of individuals that travel together throughout the course of Bury the Bride, they find themselves in situations that allow them to feel cut off from the rest of the world. Tensions rise early and often, and viewers quickly become aware of the drama and horror that will ensue throughout the rest of the film–and all that’s promised comes to be.

Bury the Bride is about as cliche a horror film as it gets. A series of beautiful women out in the middle of nowhere antagonized by a few individuals that look like they could be the stars of Deliverance–that’s pretty straightforward horror. These are things that have been used since the beginning of time to insight fear and intrigue fans of the horror genre. At this point these things are a tad corny–but that corniness makes Bury the Bride a lot of fun. The film is already a bloody good time–but the cheesy ploys used to drive the film and its story forward only make it more entertaining.

With an unexpected twist smack dab in the middle of the film, Bury the Bride goes from eerie and intense to insane and deadly in an instant. The film never drags, but it does a great job of meticulously developing the story before anything really happens. As it moves slowly, developing each piece of the narrative, that aforementioned twist breathes new life into it before it’s too late, before it ever has the chance to fade. The pacing of Bury the Bride is perfect, providing effective and efficient downtime and high-octane action that rattles viewers’ brains and keeps them on edge throughout.

My one issue with the film lies with the character development. The story is developed at an ideal rate, never missing a beat and finding ways to constantly drive the film forward without ever doing too much or employing any plot holes along the way. Some of the characters, however, don’t develop properly–and viewers see them change in ways that just don’t make sense. Characters such as Puppy (Chaz Bono) and Liz (Rachel Brunner) change so drastically throughout, and that alters how viewers see them and receive the film. Bury the Bride seriously struggles in this department, and I can’t seem to wrap my head around why these things happen throughout the film.

Bury the Bride seems like a horror film that’s unlikely to disappoint fans of the genre. It does all of the things that viewers have fallen in love with for generations of filmmaking, and it finds ways to implement them in a unique-enough fashion that allows Bury the Bride to be both familiar and new. Bury the Bride is a tantalizing journey that will keep you on the edge of your seat and keep you guessing from beginning to end.

Directed by Spider One.

Written by Krsy Fox & Spider One.

Starring Krsy Fox, Scout Taylor-Compton, Dylan Rourke, Lyndsi LaRose, Chaz Bono, etc.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐/10