Bride on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

Celestina wants to run away. The female protagonist at the center of Tayarisha Poe’s latest film, The Young Wife (2023), is supposed to get married but has quit her lucrative job, hasn’t been seen by her friends in months, and has developed a terrible rash. “It’s eczema,” her mother, played by Sheryl Lee Ralph, tells her. “It’s stress hives!” Celestina retorts. 

We meet Celestina (played by Kiersey Clemons) on the morning of her not-wedding (“It’s just a party!” she says) as she talks to Cookie (played by Judith Light), her fiancé’s grandmother and a source of wisdom throughout the film. Celestina tells Cookie about her parent’s relationship: they were “annoyingly into each other.” It is the house that her late father built for her mother that Celestina stays in throughout the film. 

The arrival of Celestina’s eclectic group of friends begins her slow unraveling. Sabrina (played by Aida Osman) confronts Celestina after she learns that Celestina has quit her job, which she has been using as an excuse to avoid contact with her friends for months. “You move through the world like it’s just you, you, you all the time,” Sabrina says. “It’s not like that. We’re not 23 anymore.”

Vibrant colors accentuate every frame of the film. A meditation coach played by Lovie Simone speaks directly through the television throughout the film. This surrealism elevates Celestina’s existential state to a state of fantastical delusion. When Celestina quits her job, it’s like she does so in a ballet-like performance as she twirls around and throws important papers from work around the office. 

But much like the high from the weed Celestina smokes repeatedly in the film, The Young Wife’s dreamy feeling eventually wears off. We meet Celestina’s fiancé, River, only towards the end of the film, but characters repeatedly warn the idealistic young woman of the shaky foundation on which she and her soon-to-be-husband are building their futures. Sabrina accuses River of “arrested development” after rattling off a list of his short-lived career pursuits including law school, murals, puppeteering, and architecture. “Is it worth it for a man who will eventually bore you?” Celestina’s mother asks her.

The Young Wife marks the sophomore follow-up to Poe’s 2019 feature film debut, Selah and the Spades. Unlike the cool and confident Black girl at the center of her first film, Poe opts here to create a portrait of a young Black woman on the verge of mental collapse. 

“I thought getting married meant you believed in the future,” Celestina confesses to River when he runs after her, “but I don’t.” River, played by Leon Bridges, goes on a brief spiel imploring his new wife to focus on the present. “What do we do when shit gets skewed?” he asks. “Recalibrate, recalibrate, recalibrate.” The young couple returns to their celebration as they dance the night away surrounded by all their loved ones. 

A few times in The Young Wife, the deaths of Celestina’s friend Eli and her father are mentioned but never deeply explored. It would’ve been interesting for the film to dedicate more time to how grief informs Celestina’s behavior. When she does run away briefly towards the end, after her not-wedding ceremony, you wonder where she’s trying to return to or what future she’s trying to find—whether the world where some of the people she loves are still alive is the one she’s trying to run back to.