Love, Hallmark, and the Art of Doing Nothing
The Sisterhood of the Travelling Wedding Veil?
Tags: #Hallmark #TheWeddingVeilTrilogy #TheWeddingVeil #TheWeddingVeilUnveiled #TheWeddingVeilLegacy
Hallmark movies are the staple of cheesy, predictable romance plots, riddled with tropes of meet-cutes in small town coffee shops, rivals to lovers, relationship miscommunications, creative competitions, and getting away from your big-city grown-up job to support your small-town family business in times of need. For the most part, they usually try to have a storyline, even if they tend to be ridiculously predictable. The Wedding Veil trilogy (Hallmark, 2022), however, breaks new ground by refusing to have any narrative at all, three times. That’s right, why experiment with non-storytelling only once when you can make it into a neat little trilogy?
You’ve heard of children playing matchmaker, but how about inanimate objects? On their yearly girls' weekend, Avery, Emma, and Tracy find an old wedding veil whose owner is destined to find their one true love. This sets up the plot, or lack thereof, for all three movies while everyone just goes back to their job. Throughout the 90 mins-times-three runtime, there’s no conflict to resolve, no obstacle to overcome, and no antagonist to defeat. The movies are a philosophical experiment in testing how little can happen on screen while still being called a movie. Hallmark has finally asked: What if we make romance movies where absolutely nothing happens?
Act One: The Wedding Veil - A Veil, a Job, and a Man Who Exists
In the titular movie of the Wedding Veil trilogy, three friends are antiquing when they discover an old Italian lace veil. Although none of them are planning a wedding, they decide to all buy it together because that’s what white women do in the Hallmarkverse when an object comes with lore. The most wedding-obsessed friend, Avery, is the first to keep the veil. Coincidentally, she also meets a hot stranger at a museum where they both discuss their love of visiting exhibitions alone to read every placard. Upon returning to the hotel they were both staying at, the male love interest sees the veil and presumes she’s getting married, because who else just has a veil? He doesn’t question her to confirm if his guess is correct, and they go their separate ways to get back to work.
However, the Hallmarkverse works in mysterious ways, and he is the new board member of the art gallery where Avery works. They decide to plan a wedding-themed fundraising event together, around some old painting of a bride no one has ever heard of but will be a huge draw for donors. Then they both do their jobs for roughly 50 minutes. During this time, Avery is also planning a friend’s wedding, and the to-do lists for both events are shockingly similar, causing more confusion with the male lead who has yet to confirm his supposition surrounding her relationship status. Eventually, they are both at the friend’s wedding, somehow, and the ‘mystery’ is solved. Avery is not getting married, she just owns a veil. Cue wedding between Avery and the guy and that’s the end.
The bar is already on the floor for our expectations for Hallmark storylines but we at least expected some plot. Instead, we watch people go to work. There were meetings with colleagues, vendors, and Avery’s boss. The male lead got to do some work with a “art history” lesson for children. There were phone calls for work and emails were sent. Occasionally, Avery discussed work with her friends from the girls’ trip. Sometimes there were work lunches. There was no engagement or grand romantic gesture after a huge misunderstanding. They just got married at the end and passed the veil off to Emma to take on her work trip to Italy.
Act Two: The Wedding Veil: Unveiled - So, We’re Doing This Again?
In the second installment of women at work, Emma is leading an American Art History class for an Italian college over the summer. She takes the veil with her, because it’s Italian lace and she will be close to some old lace makers. Avery and Tracy think that Emma will be able to rock up to a store and say, hey, did you make this? And someone will know! And guess what?! That’s precisely what happens. She walks into the second store she sees and finds the ancestors of the original wedding veil lace maker, a small-town family run business.
The lace maker’s family still makes lace, and their progressive son wants to expand their business to America. He is also the attractive stranger that taught Emma (and us) how to use an Italian ferry ticket machine. (Fun fact: the order of American and European dates are different.) After finding the lace maker, Emma teaches about three or four classes. Then she does some research in her capacity as a history lecturer and discovers the origin of the veil.
Then, she and the male lead get married, but not before going on a sightseeing trip and enjoying a local festival. Somehow, this is the best movie of the whole trilogy. There was an attempt at a mystery, but in reality, it was just a professor doing their job on a research project. Don’t worry, the male lead also had work to do: he had some family meetings for the business and made a powerpoint at Emma’s suggestion.
So, as we can see, the lack of a plot was copy-pasted from movie number one. Except, we are now in Italy. That’s it. It makes more logistical sense than some Hallmark specials, but it is not an interest-grabbing production. It is the visual version of elevator music.
Act Three: The Wedding Veil: Legacy - At This Point, It’s Performance Art
By the third movie, we should have some variation or drama. Spoilers: We don’t. The veil is back in the girls’ possession despite Emma giving it back to the Italian family. Avery noticed a tiny rip and, as we all know, the best Italian lace repairmen are not the original lace makers but New York men’s tailors, so Tracy takes the veil back home. While dropping off the veil at the tailors’, some guy who is there to get a tuxedo altered chats her up and they both decide the other is getting married.
The auction house Tracy works at is in need of a caterer for an event, and lo and behold, it is Tuxedo Guy that shows up. Tuxedo Guy also needs help picking out art for his new restaurant and, luckily, Tracy’s mother owns a gallery. Wow. The two decide to work together for the event and the opening of the restaurant. They go to various meetings together and work separately on their own events for 95% of the movie. The other 5% of the movie is walking around the streets of New York City, because you can’t set a movie in NYC and not showcase NYC.
Then, after the auction and restaurant opening, they either immediately get married or Tuxedo Guy bought a ring at the auction and held onto it for months or years before eventually gifting it to Tracy as a wedding present after the wedding reception. They really dropped the ball timeline-wise with this movie, but the amount of effort put into it was equally null.
That Hallmark lost momentum plot-wise from the second movie sounds impossible, but it did happen. The third movie was the weakest of the trilogy, maybe because there were less meetings. Work was completed, more phone calls were made, the auction took place. The continuous lack of a plot made it really difficult to care at all by this point. So, we didn’t.
Conclusion: Did AI Write This? Is This the Future of Hallmark?
Despite Hallmark’s reputation for a monopoly on quick, cookie-cutter rom-coms, the Wedding Veil trilogy really stretches what can be considered a romance. They are not comedic, that is obvious, but despite their heavy wedding theme, it’s more of a slow-burn psychological thriller where the real horror is watching people just do their jobs. There is a market for ‘cozy rom-coms’ but those manage to contain plot and heavily rely on tropes. These movies were less cozy, more business casual.
The lack of a coherent plotline made us wonder if the trilogy was actually made with the help of generative AI by being fed Linked-In posts. Or, perhaps, Hallmark tested how little effort can be put into a movie production while still getting people to watch. The fact that they made three more movies about the veil after this, entering into a Wedding Veil hexology, is concerning to say the least. Who is consuming this media? Are they okay? Or do they really just love workplace training videos disguised as romance non-plots?
Go watch it, or don’t.