The Wedding Banquet review: An adorable meditation on queer urban families

Verdant Seattle is its own character in this charming romantic comedy from director Andrew Ahn, a remake of the 1993 Ang Lee classic, which skilfully captures the city’s breathtaking natural beauty and earthy, left-leaning energy. The Tales of the City-style story, about the nourishment of queer urban families, also benefits from lived-in authenticity.

While light and frothy on the surface, the film – which screened at last night’s opening night of the 2025 BFI Flare: London LGBT Film Festival – is saturated with underlying heaviness: a steadfast Kelly Marie Tran is put through the ringer as main character as Angela, a shy scientist for whom questions of marriage and parenthood trigger existential crises so seismic, she’s frequently in tears. A grand Lily Gladstone is an effective counterpoint as Angela’s partner Lee, for whom the emotional pain of two failed attempts at IVF is always bubbling beneath a stoic surface. One deeply expressive scene between the pair, involving prolonged silence, is sublime.

Addictive comic relief, meanwhile, comes in the singular form of Bowen Yang as deadpan drifter and avid birdwatcher Chris, Angela’s best friend. Bowen, of course, can evoke belly laughs with little more than an arched eyebrow, and rising star Han Gi-chan matches him in the ridiculousness stakes as Chris’s delightfully plainspoken boyfriend Min. 

Rounding out the cast are two bona fide cinematic legends: the breathtakingly effervescent Joan Chen as May, Angela’s formerly homophobic and now overcompensating mother, and Oscar-winner Youn Yuh-jung as Min’s no-nonsense grandmother, who eventually takes a surprising position on his green card wedding to “lesbian snake” Angela. (What a line! What a delivery!) Both are unfathomably compelling, and it’s an event that they’re here together. So much so, you find yourself wishing they were on-screen more.

Another issue is a central plot point involving the faintly blurred lines of Angela and Chris’s relationship, which isn’t foregrounded enough, and lands as clunkily as Madonna and Rupert Everett’s the-morning-after-the-night-before routine in 1998’s The Next Best Thing. Marginal bisexuality is an interesting subject, and in the specific case of homoflexibility (in this case, ‘gay with an asterisk’?), pretty under-explored on screen. The Wedding Banquet, however, plays it for “WTF!”-style slapstick – which is not without its charm. The problem is the awkward pivot to to high stakes drama when Lee finds out. 

If these and other plot points are tied up with a touch too much postcard-perfect neatness overall, such issues are easily overlooked once Ahn’s wider point about the fluidity of queer friendship, and the beautiful places it can take us, is made by the touching final scene.