‘My Mother’s Wedding’ Review – Be Thankful You’re Not On The Guest List

My Mother’s Wedding tells the story of a twice-widowed mother preparing to marry a third time. Sprinkle in some latent family woes and past trauma, and it is more than a wedding celebration. However, despite boasting a strong cast, led by Scarlett Johansson, the movie feels like four weddings and a funeral, no, I’m not invoking the Hugh Grant comedy classic. My Mother’s Wedding is a slog that never justifies its existence. It becomes the guest who stays too long at the wedding, and when you’re the driver, you end up ready to drag them out because it’s time to go home.

Returning home for their mother’s wedding, three sisters prepare to celebrate family and reconcile trauma. All three sisters hail from different walks of life. Katherine (Scarlett Johansson doing her best attempt at a British accent) is a captain in the Royal Navy. Victoria (Sienna Miller) is a Hollywood starlet. Georgina (Emily Beecham) is a hospice nurse. Their mother, Diana (Kristin Scott Thomas), is preparing to walk down the aisle a third time. As the family celebrates the weekend, the three sisters and their mother revisit the past. Old secrets spill out, and the wedding guests add their two cents, making for a weekend to remember.

Herein lies the difficulty with an ensemble piece—too many characters. We are following a myriad of storylines, but the narrative becomes like the wedding guest who overstays their welcome. The story is tipsy. Mother and daughters are reconciling with their past trauma, but much of the narrative feels like a post-it note, rather than anything heartfelt. There is a compelling argument to be made that Diana’s past as a widow is the strongest storyline, and that the film might be better served by focusing on Diana’s woes and new love.

However, the movie goes out of its way to shoehorn all the daughter’s challenges into a single narrative. The hamfisted attempt to make all the storylines intersect derails any attempts to craft a meaningful story. Perhaps it is the runtime. Clocking in at ninety minutes, the movie expects a lot from its audience, while offering mere platitudes and stock character bios to bring us up to speed.

Katherine, by nature of her job, spends months away at sea and wrestles with her career and commitments to her family. Georgina is grappling with problems in her marriage. Victoria is looking for love in all the wrong places. The short runtime is a problem, but it is not the whole matter. The characters declare their problems. They wallow in self-pity, but they never articulate their feelings or grow. Parts of this script are reminiscent of a first-table read, void of any emotion or depth.

There is never a moment in the movie where we can connect with any of these characters on an emotional level. They are wrestling with their pasts and are uncertain about their future, but again, to what end? We enter these characters’ lives fully formed, and any amount of exposition is simply that — exposition. We yearn for a storyline to fill with gusto, or a character to make us feel something other than boredom.  

The central crux involves Diana marrying for the third time and finally having her happily ever after. The backstory, stemming from her past marriages (which were short-lived due to the tragedy that befell her husbands), reveals that she has never been truly happy. She finds her prince charming, while her daughters are wrestling with the woes of their own and living for the fathers taken from them too soon. Again, is this a comedy or a dramedy? The movie never decides, and neither can we, thanks in part to the sing-song changing tones.

My Mother’s Wedding boils down to a waste of a cast and a spoiling of a premise. As is the case with a week-old wedding cake, this one is stale and better left uneaten.

My Mother’s Wedding will debut exclusively in theaters on August 8, 2025, courtesy of Vertical Entertainment.