The Wedding Banquet screened at the 2025 Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival. Bleecker Street will release it in theaters on April 18th.

Remaking Ang Lee’s 1993 film The Wedding Banquet in 2025 doesn’t make much sense. For starters, gay marriage has been legalized and is more widely accepted than it was then, and the idea of needing to marry is no longer as prescient. However, director Andrew Ahn, co-writing with the original film’s writer, James Schamus, doesn’t let those obstacles get in the way of updating a story that is much more universal than it is specific.

Shifting the story from Manhattan to modern-day Seattle, Ahn also doubles the trouble by expanding the central conceit of a gay man going through a sham marriage to ward off his suspecting parents by adding a lesbian couple into the mix. Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) and Lee (Lily Gladstone) have been unsuccessfully trying to have a family through IVF treatment. It’s taken a toll on both the emotional and financial stability of their relationship. Living in their garage is the gay couple of Chris (Bowen Yang) and Min (Han Gi-Chan), the former sitting indecisively at a crossroads in his life, and the latter scrambling to find a way to stay in America before his visa expires and he’ll have to move back home to Korea to work in the family conglomerate business. The simple solution would be for Min and Chris to get married, but Chris can’t pull the trigger and Min’s family is still in the dark about his homosexuality and wouldn’t take too kindly to it. So Min proposes to Angela instead, offering to pay for her IVF treatment out of his trust fund in exchange for faking a heteronormative wedding so that he can obtain a green card.

Even more so than it did back then, this plan makes no sense. Min is obviously loaded with cash and has been best friends with Angela and Lee for years, so why has he never offered to help out before? How far do Min and Angela expect to take this charade? Min’s grandmother (Youn Yuh-jung) is very adamant about him getting married, so I’d assume grandchildren are also part of her plan. A green card gotten through marriage is conditional for two years, meaning Min and Angela would need to legally stick together for at least that long. There are about five more holes I could poke, but you get the idea.

For as much as these gaps sink the boat of logic, they also highlight key societal struggles. The challenge of starting a family is no longer about the fear of public perception, but its financial viability. Gay marriage and homosexual relationships may be fine in this generation and in parts of the world like Seattle, but members of the older generation like Min’s grandmother aren’t as open to the idea. Even Angela’s mother (Joan Chen), while a proud lesbian ally now, was very much against the idea of her daughter not following the traditional path of marrying a man.

Ahn and Schamus are always precise with the emotional stakes of the story. There are plenty of moments to laugh, cry, or a bit of both. This is also a movie that serves its cast extremely well, all of them performers who have largely never been given the spotlight that they deserve. Any combination of characters, either one-on-one, in pairs, or in a group setting, makes for a sensational scene. The clear standout is Youn Yuh-jung, whose character adds yet another layer when she reveals that her marriage was arranged and that she never got the option to fall in love. If not for her recent Oscar win for Minari, I’d mount a serious campaign for her this year. Then again, the Academy has clearly become more open to awarding performers with multiple Oscars, so anything is possible.

There’s a threading of the needle with all of this, melding the charmingly broad implausibility of a studio rom-com with the more serious-minded grounded indies. Which flavor you’re more inclined to like, Ahn has a slice of it waiting for you.