She-Devil (1989)

She-Devil is a wickedly satisfying comedy that turns marital betrayal into a stylized, darkly gleeful fable about reinvention, powered by the delicious contrast between Roseanne Barr’s plainspoken fury and Meryl Streep’s impeccably coiffed vanity. Susan Seidelman stages the whole thing with an off-center, almost storybook bite—sharp, brisk, and knowingly over the top—so the laughs land even when the situation gets mean. It’s less a warm rom-com than a revenge fantasia, where the fun is watching pride, image, and entitlement get punctured with escalating ingenuity. If you prefer your comedy gentle and realistic, this may feel too caustic, but if you’re in the mood for a smart, actor-driven takedown that’s unafraid to be a little nasty, it’s a treat.

She-Devil is clearly aiming for a broad, revenge-fantasy satire about a wronged wife flipping the power dynamic and rebuilding her life, and there’s a pulpy, soap-opera glee in how far it pushes that premise. The problem is the comedy often lands with a thud: it’s mean-spirited in a way that can feel more sour than sharp, and the cartoonish escalation muddles whatever point it wants to make about marriage, sexism, and ambition. Meryl Streep is game and oddly magnetic as the glossy “other woman,” but even she can’t fully smooth over the film’s forced humor and occasional ugly undertones. If you like dark, exaggerated ’80s farce and don’t mind vulgarity or a blunt, messy moral compass, you might have fun; if you want clever satire with real warmth or coherence, this will likely irritate you.