A Hancock County-shot film by an Orono native is now available to watch on all major streaming platforms, and viewers will undoubtedly see landmarks they recognize over the course of the movie’s runtime.
“The Bride in the Box,” a years-in-the-making project for screenwriter and director Doug Bost, was filmed in 2018 in the towns of Hancock, Winter Harbor and Ellsworth, and tells the story of a father and daughter on vacation in Maine, who become wrapped up in a ghost story that may be fiction — or may be fact.
Bost, a longtime theater and film writer in New York City, was inspired to write the script for “Bride” after co-writing “Diminished Capacity,” a 2008 comedy starring Matthew Broderick and Alan Alda. He knew he wanted to write a feature-length film again, and after a number of years he completed “Bride.”
As a Maine native, Bost knew he not only wanted to set the story in the state — he knew he wanted to film it here, too. Bost grew up surrounded by theater and the arts, as the son of James Bost, a theater professor at the University of Maine for 26 years in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. Bost’s brother, Stephen, has been city manager of Brewer for more than 20 years. His connections to the state remain strong, despite having lived in New York for decades.
“It just made a lot of sense for us to film in Maine — we had a small cast, small crew and only a few locations,” Bost said. “It just wouldn’t have been the same filming in New York.”
While Maine’s film industry is small, and production companies often skip filming in Maine to get better tax incentives in places like New York, Massachusetts and Canada, Bost said he received a lot of help from locals, from location scouting to sourcing crew members.
“Friends of mine let me rent their house in Hancock to shoot, and businesses were really accommodating in letting us shoot there,” Bost said. “And we were all in Maine with nothing else to distract us, so it was just a really creative, focused shoot overall.”
“The Bride in the Box” stars Victor Verhaghe (“Boardwalk Empire,” “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”) as Don, who goes on vacation with his 11-year-old daughter, Iris (played by Bost’s daughter, Acadia), staying in a seaside cottage in Hancock, where they are eventually joined by Don’s wife, Heather (played by Bost’s wife, Carolyn Baeumler). There, the couple’s relationship begins to fray, while Iris becomes obsessed with a mysterious trunk in the house that can’t be opened, and begins to get wrapped up in a ghost story that may or may not be all in her head.
Among several notable locations, “Bride” has scenes that were shot on Hancock Point in Hancock, at the IGA grocery store in Winter Harbor and at 1A Relics, an antique shop in Ellsworth. Bost and crew shot the film in 2018, but financial and pandemic delays kept the film from being completed until 2021.
“Bride” had a premiere at the Maine International Film Festival last year, and this year, Bost found a distributor for the movie, which as of last month is available to rent on Amazon, Apple and all over major streaming platforms.