Mischievous devil Pinchiukas makes a deal with mill owner Baltaragis to help him marry his true love and ensure the success of his business in exchange for the hand of his daughter in marriage in director Arunas Zebriunas’s raucous 1974 Lithuanian folk-rock odyssey, The Devil’s Bride.
The film opens with a brief note attempting to set the stage for what is to come, a gentle introduction describing a time where angels and devils are fighting for dominion over the earth and that it seems a devil or two may have escaped into the countryside to wreak havoc among the locals. Take a deep breath and savor this moment, because it’s the last time The Devil’s Bride will allow you a moment with your thoughts before it launches into a 78-minute audio-visual barrage of ideas, music, and chaotic storytelling that is not for the faint of heart.
If you were to read the basic storyline for The Devil’s Bride, it seems fairly straightforward, even with its overtly fantastical elements. The demon Pinchiukas (Gediminas Girdvainis) makes a crooked deal with Baltaragis (Vasyl Symchych) to help him with his work and his love life in exchange for the hand of his first-born daughter, Jurga (Vaiva Mainelyte). By the time the deal comes due, Baltaragis is filled with regret and Jurga has fallen in love with the handsome Girdvainis (Vaiva Mainelyte), and now everyone is trying to find a way to outwit the father's mistake.
However, what transpires in The Devil’s Bride is an operatic onslaught of song, dance, exposition in the form of cryptic poetry, and a series of mesmerizing repetitive musical themes that literally never stop. Unlike the western version of this story, something like DePalma’s Faustian The Phantom of the Paradise which uses song to emphasize moments in the standard narrative, The Devil’s Bride feels more like a ‘60s psychedelic stage opera, where there is no spoken dialogue that is not in the form of song. As such, the music is a constant companion, at times pummelingly so, which often makes the narrative of the film more of a riddle than a straight forward story.
Thankfully, once the opening note passes into the film proper – via a literal framing device that lets the audience know that we are in for a fairy tale – Zebriunas wastes no time setting the scene and letting the audience know to gird their loins. The opening in which angels and devils sing and dance while God looks on from his gilded throne is perhaps the most exciting of the musical numbers that saturate The Devil’s Bride. With echoes of Hair or Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, the opening feels familiar enough to western eyes to draw the viewer into the story. What follows is utterly chaotic, nonstop, and impossible to look away from.
It becomes apparent very early on following that classically staged musical number that The Devil’s Bride is going to be either exactly on the viewer’s wavelength or an endurance trial. The uninterrupted musical numbers are both repetitive and bizarrely clashing, with little to no transitional time from one tune to the other. The oft-repeating character themes do well to help the audience understand who is primary from scene to scene, but they also stop and start on a dime, making the film difficult to follow as the viewer is frequently playing catch up.
With all the elements of a cult musical – hummable music, big boisterous characters, and wild and over-the-top characters – The Devil’s Bride is one of the year’s great rediscoveries. The new 4K scan debuting at Fantasia 2025 from boutique distributors Deaf Crocodile brings the film to glorious, cacophonous life in a way that will allow new fans to enjoy this bizarre experience as it was meant to be seen. Though the film is definitely not for everyone, those who enjoy this sort of outsider-esque filmmaking are in for a treat. A film that feels somehow both like an Eastern Bloc Babes in Toyland style fantasy and also as if Jodorowsky made a musical is a bold swing, but I’ll be damned if I’ll ever forget it.