Kristin Scott Thomas makes her directing debut with My Mother's Wedding, a family drama built around a third wedding, three daughters and a family that cannot get through the weekend without reopening old wounds. The Oscar-nominated actor also co-wrote the film with John Micklethwait, and she reunites on screen with James Fleet as Diana prepares to marry Jeff Loveglove for the third time.
Diana has already lost two husbands in the space of a few years, but now she is ready to walk down the aisle again and gathers Katherine, Victoria and Georgina for hen and stag dos before a simple service at the local church and a marquee reception in the back garden. Katherine is played by Scarlett Johansson, Victoria by Sienna Miller and Georgina by Emily Beecham, with the youngest child drawn as an NHS nurse and mother of two daughters. The film has listed screenings from Friday 22nd May to Thursday 4th June, with times including Fri-Tue 15:00 and 17:30, and Wed 14:40 and 18:20.
Scott Thomas’s best-known screen success was in a romantic comedy built around four weddings, and her own film leans into a familiar mix of sibling rivalry and sisterly solidarity. It also adds a practical problem: Johansson wrestles gamely with a British accent and can seem oddly removed from the rest of the cast, even as the script pushes toward climactic reconciliations in a classic three-act structure. The result is a haphazard celebration of love lost and found, one that can feel like a bottle of champagne that popped its cork days ago and has lost most of its tongue-tingling fizz.
The film does have moments of invention. Flashbacks arrive as monochrome animations hand-painted by Iranian artist Reza Riahi, which give the past a visual shape the dialogue rarely finds. But the review says Scott Thomas also obliges with a contrived explosion of family secrets at roughly the hour mark, and that the side tracks do not always help. A bumbling private detective named Steve turns up with secret video footage of Jeremy’s betrayal, while Victoria’s rich admirer is treated as another unnecessary diversion. Even Victoria’s aside — that the nice ones are too busy being nice to go out with famous actresses — sounds less like a revelation than a reminder that this family has heard every version of disappointment before.
That is why My Mother's Wedding works less as a tidy domestic comedy than as a crowded, uneven portrait of how families rehearse old grievances while insisting they are celebrating. Scott Thomas has the structure, the cast and the setting to make that land, but the film’s own review leaves the answer plain: the emotions are real enough, yet the execution often arrives too late, too loudly or with too little fizz to fully catch fire.
