After coming off of the high that was “Coyote vs. ACME”, a film that was filled with so much fun and entertainment, the very next session (and my penultimate for the film festival) turned out to be the nadir of my MIFF for 2026. I absolutely hated Angela Schanelec's “My Wife Cries” with a passion, and just could not see the point of it for the majority of it's running time. While I do own Schanelec's “I Was At Home, But” (2019) on blu ray (due to my absolute trust in Second Run's film curation), I have still yet to watch it, nor any other of her features prior to this new one, and only saw “My Wife Cries” because the MIFF guide suggested that the film should appeal to fans of Aki Kaurismaki, which I am one in a big way, but I was done dirty by the guide, as this film is nothing like the genius of that Finnish director.
Despite “My Wife Cries” being shot on 35mm film, I was immediately turned off by the film's ugly visual style and Schanelec's baffling decisions on some of her shot selections which looked very amateurish. We meet Thomas, a crane operator and one of our main characters, as his crane needs to fixed and he waits inside the company's office while this happens. Schanelec places Thomas against an off white wall, sitting on a basic chair as he drinks a cup of coffee, while office workers talk to him off camera about his life. It is one of the most ugly shots in cinema history, as there is no beauty anywhere to be found in it, and Schanelec stays on this shot for what seems like an eternity before she finally cuts to one of the people Thomas is talking to, but this is another equally awkwardly framed shot. I knew I was in trouble with “My Wife Cries” right then, or maybe it clouded my judgement on the film because this opening scene made me so angry. Throughout the film, it was like it was a deliberate choice to find the most inappropriate spot for the camera to go, or to make sure that each shot looked ugly. This is how I felt while watching “My Wife Cries”, but in preparation of writing this review, I re-watched the film's trailer and was surprised by how visually beautiful it looked, this is why I have added the caveat that this initial scene may have clouded how I saw the film.
The reason why I think the MIFF guide stated that fans of Aki Kaurismaki might get something out of “My Wife Cries” is because of the stylised acting style within the film. It lacks emotion, and dialogue is very stilted; this is not a realistic depiction of human behaviour at all. And that is fine, because as you can obviously guess, I find this stylisation works wonderfully well in Kaurismaki's films, but then his whole film is stylised, not just the dialogue. His version of Helsinki is not a true representation of that city, it is almost like Kaurismaki's own cinematic world. Schanelec on the other hand sets her story in a very real Germany, so the odd way people talk in her film just comes off feeling weird, because normal people do not talk like that. Also the conversations the friends all have between each other border on the boring to the nonsensical, as they attempt to be some kind of pseudo-philosophical crap about human relationships and what makes them work, but it just feels so fake and made up, not to mention, forced.
I just found “My Wife Cries” to be a very strange film, and not in a good way, because I am a fan of the unusual in cinema, but here it just felt like nothing worked, or even complimented each other. Because of the acting style in the film, and the performances from Vladimir Vulevic and Agathe Bonitzer (who play Thomas and Carla), I just found no emotion or care between this supposed married couple. Carla has gone through something horrific, which has exposed something bigger for the future of the couple, and yet you would not know it because of the way everyone acts. You would expect Thomas to show both care and anger, if not confusion, towards Carla but the stilted dialogue takes this all away, so we the audience also feel nothing about the drama unfolding onscreen in front of us. So much so, that my session did have a few walk-outs too; after awhile people had just had enough and left.
The other thing that really bothered me about “My Wife Cries” is that weird things just happened out of the blue sometimes. Carla, exhausted from her trauma ends up at a friend's place with Thomas and a group of friends. They are all engaging in conversations about the married couple's ordeal, when suddenly out of nowhere the friends all start doing a choreographed dance, each entering the dance one after the another until they are all dancing, except Carla who has fallen asleep on the couch. It is so strange, but paradoxically it was also my favourite scene in the film because I like a bit of dance in my movies, but where the hell did it come from?!? Also, for the whole entire scene, both before the dance and during, one of the characters is only wearing a towel. Okay, so he may have just gotten out of the shower, but the scene goes on forever.......PUT SOME CLOTHES ON!!!!! So weird.
The final straw though was the ending of “My Wife Cries” because it just stops, out of the blue. Thomas is walking his bike home, Carla is waiting for him on a bench outside, Thomas says some pointless dialogue, the film cuts to Carla who says nothing, and the film ends. Um, excuse me? I just sat through ninety plus minutes for nothing to be resolved and for the film to just end. And this was after Carla fondled some man's flaccid penis, it was hard to tell who but I think it was the guy in the towel, for no apparent reason too. I give up on this movie! It was absolutely terrible.
Overall, if you cannot tell already, I hated “My Wife Cries” and it was my least favourite film I saw at MIFF this year, and it was also the penultimate film I saw. The stylised acting removed all emotion from the film, so I found myself not being able to care one iota for the characters onscreen, not to mention I also thought that the film was extremely ugly from a visual sense. My final question though about “My Wife Cries” is, how does such a crap movie end up with such a beautiful movie poster?!? Baffling.
1.5 Stars.
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