“The Young Wife” Cries Empty Tears

The Young Wife (Tayarisha Poe, 2023) 2 out of 5 stars

A work of evident artistic ambition and some occasional flashes of visual wit to match, The Young Wife nevertheless suffers from the cinematic sin of over-intellectualizing the mundane. The protagonist is a bride-to-be experiencing doubts about not only her marriage but her place in the world and the very fragile nature of the world in general. This is the quintessential twentysomething’s crisis of faith. So what’s new?

Writer/director Tayarisha Poe (Selah and the Spades) no doubt grasps the ordinary nature of her main character’s dilemma, and so attacks it from many angles at once, hoping to enliven the proceedings. Celestina (Kiersey Clemons, Susie Searches) has invited her entire network of friends and family to a celebration of her nuptials, held at her mother’s house on the Georgia coast. As successive guests arrive, the narrative stops and starts, interrupted by onscreen text and quasi-supernatural moments where not only Celestina’s consciousness appears to fracture, but ours, as well.

There is an appeal to this approach, since for much of the first half of the movie we can sit back and allow the heightened reality—more like surreality—to wash over us like a delightful enchantment. Unfortunately, the downside of telling a story this way, even one with such a clearly experimental structure, is that not a single person registers as three-dimensional. Instead, every character, including the central one, comes across as a construct in a metaphorical exercise run amok.

The result is a sometimes-engaging abstract thought piece with stakes that evaporate as soon as they are articulated. Making matters worse, the only performance that resonates is Clemons’ (then again, she is always wonderful). The rest of the cast is burdened with dialogue that veers from expositional to nonsensical. The words spoken either tell us directly what is happening or nothing at all.

The gist of the plot is that Celestina, who has just quit her well-paid corporate job because it served no larger purpose, can’t quite understand the point of getting married, even though she loves her beau, River (musician Leon Bridges). Surrounded by an increasingly hyped-up (and irritating) gaggle of wedding attendees, she repeats that this is not actually a wedding, but merely a party, as if that will make the pressures of impending couplehood less severe. Not helping matters is her disapproving mom (Sheryl Lee Ralph, The Comeback Trail), who emphasizes time and again what a mistake Celestina is making.

Despite this very human conflict, the sum total of Celestina’s fraught moments amounts to little more than spectator headache. At least the location stuns, surrounded by water that threatens to flood the land (as is mentioned over and over, to no result). What actually happens there, however, proves far less interesting.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Christopher Llewellyn Reed is a film critic, filmmaker, and educator, as well as Film Festival Today's Editor. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.