MOVIE REVIEW: Björn Runge's 'The Wife' Is Not Going to Satisfy Women Viewers [Preview]

I wanted Björn Runge's The Wife to be a good movie. I wanted to bask in Glenn Close embodying that simmering, curdling rage I see reflected and refracted around me at an ever-growing fever pitch; I wanted to find some catharsis in a movie about a woman who has sacrificed everything for her husband because the world would otherwise never see her value.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3750872/mediaviewer/rm3029497856

Yet despite the confoundingly warm reception and exaggerated Oscar buzz for Close's performance as an archetype that many women can undoubtedly relate to, The Wife fails on nearly every level as a movie. Bogged down by numerous overly broad performances, a plot so formulaic it might as well as been calcified, a maudlin score, and a total lack of visual sensibility or style, The Wife is not the story that the collective (American) female frustration and fury of 2018 deserves in the least.

You can read the rest of this review at PopMatters.