The Bride With White Hair poster & wallpaper

Brigitte Lin, Leslie Cheung, Francis Ng

When a beautiful woman (Brigitte Lin) saves a man (Leslie Cheung) from a pack of wolves, the bond she stitches between them holds forever. Now on opposite sides of warring clans, the star-crossed love...( read more  read more... )rs must re-examine their loyalties. Thrilling swordplay drives their aching romance to an uncertain end.

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75% liked it

4,375 ratings

Unrated, 89 min.

Directed by: Ronny Yu

Release Date: January 1, 1993

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DVD Release Date: July 21, 1998

Stats: 173 reviews

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Flixster Reviews (173)

  • stopitgoaway
    October 15, 2009
    stopitgoaway
    The Bride With White Hair is a curious beast. Much of the first half of the film feels like you've seen it a hundred times before (a troubled sifu/student relationship, divided loyalties, warring clans and the rise of what would become a united China) and the style often looks li...( read more)ke a relatively low-budget film trying to look more expensive than it is rather than the genuinely expensive film it was, with director Ronny Yu shooting much of the film in near darkness with deep blacks, heavy blue filters and smokey backlighting, stylistic devices that aren't to everyone's visual taste. The action scenes are often played out via jerky step-printing (where the film is shot at around 12 frames per second or less but each frame is printed twice or more to create a sense of motion at normal speed that's either heightened or degraded depending on your point of view). While the film was shot on massive sets (genuine exteriors are few and far between), they're neither lit or shot to stress their scale or often to be particularly visually interesting, with much of the early action of the film very deliberately styled after a shadow-puppet play, all profiles and silhouettes. And yet gradually it casts its spell over you and begins to grip as the story becomes more ambitious and intriguing.

    On the surface it's a Romeo and Juliet story between Leslie Cheung's heir apparent to a clan dedicated to good but filled with doubt no-one else shares about the severity with which it is enforced and Brigitte Lin's "wolf-girl" (meaning she was raised by wolves rather than turns into one) who has been trained as a supernatural killing machine by an evil pagan cult and who sports a particularly lethal whip that Indiana Jones would kill for - sharper than a meat cleaver and very handy for slicing-and-dicing any number of opponents. Their inevitably doomed romance occupies a moral middle ground that, naturally, neither side will tolerate, with their respective rejected mentors eager to reclaim their undivided loyalty. In many ways the film is a rejection of all the intransigent moral codes of the fantasy swordplay genre, where even the "good" clan and their allies are so blinded by their own self-importance that they have no qualms about killing innocent peasants just to be on the safe side in case they're lying ("Better to kill a hundred innocents than let one guilty escape"). And just to add to the complexity, the film offers a truly unique villain ? a pair of male/female Siamese twins, the sister often goading her brother over his inability to understand the woman he loves. The finale is certainly unusually ambitious, and can be seen either as a fantasy battle or as a physical realisation of the hero's nervous breakdown: either way, it offers a welcome level of emotional weight to what could easily have been clichéd fare. It's a film that has a lot working against it, but it lingers in the memory long after it's over. A shame Tartan's UK DVD is such poor quality (and, aside from some good film notes, extras-free as well: a pity since the troubled shoot ? which apparently saw a few Triad bombing attacks on the studios to add to their woes ? could bear further examination).
  • kenstachnik
    September 22, 2008
    kenstachnik
    Highlander + wuxia + Romeo & Juliet - Queen
  • lavenderfawn
    January 11, 2008
    lavenderfawn
    I really thought this movie would be cheesey...it actually was very beautiful and an interesting folktale, to say the least. highly recommended for anyone who enjoys Asian fantasy.
  • Beefy
    August 11, 2007
    Beefy
    Wasn't as involving as I had hoped it would be.
  • DragonEyeMorrison
    June 14, 2007
    DragonEyeMorrison
    Solid wuxia with the right mix of action, romance and fantasy. Leslie Cheung and Brigitte Lin have good on-screen chemistry. Only complaint would be some unecessary slow-motion in the fight scenes, aside from that this is a little jewel that deserves a watch.
  • lesleyanorton
    October 17, 2009
    lesleyanorton
    Swords, sorcery, romance, high wire jumping, flashy lights, coloured smoke. I prefer the old 70's Kung Fu classics. This was a little too 1980's MTV for me.
  • CHILIcheeseDONUTSwithTUNAonTOP
    September 6, 2009
    CHILIcheeseDONUTSwithTUNAonTOP
    A lot of great action, but too much romance and not enough comedy in this kung-fu flick.
  • exureimundo
    June 16, 2009
    exureimundo
    I read that Sam Raimi based Xena: Warrior Princess on this movie, and as soon as I watched it, I fell in love with Brigitte Lin. It is a typical Hong Kong Wuxia film, with obnoxious love scenes, but the production seems to make up for an apparently low budget by artistic and uniq...( read more)ue visual techniques. The story is not that original, but the characters on both sides are extremely unusual.
    (see "Bride" part 2 for the rest of this review, since I think of both parts as really being one whole movie)
  • VictoriaIsMeName
    August 3, 2008
    VictoriaIsMeName
    I love my Asian movies
  • wingadam
    June 2, 2008
    wingadam
    Classic fantasy adventure with a great villian and a rubbish sequel.

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