Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (2025)

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy arrives as the fourth entry in a franchise that has outlived several of its own premises, and it opens with a celebration of life for Mark Darcy, dead four years and still hogging the emotional real estate. Renée Zellweger returns to the role with the same fluttery precision, now steering two children, a widow's bed, and a Tinder profile through a London that has grown politely indifferent to her diaries. There is an owl outside the window. The owl means something. The film is too well-mannered to say what.

The picture's cultural gestures are modest and largely unannounced. Chiwetel Ejiofor takes the romantic lead as the science teacher, a pairing the film presents without ceremony, and Josette Simon appears with similar ease. Bridget's return to work lands her on a women's programme, surrounded by female colleagues and a friend group that functions as a standing committee on her love life. The frame remains that of a conventional romance, with the younger park ranger and the widowed producer and the third-act kiss arranged in the customary order. The franchise's old preoccupation with weighing its heroine has mostly evaporated, leaving a faint, incidental suggestion that a woman in her fifties might be desired. That is the extent of the thesis.

What the film does not do is lecture. Grief, parenting, and the business of living fully are folded into the plot instead of announced from a pulpit, and the nearest thing to a sermon is a science teacher explaining Newton's third law as a chat-up line. There is no climate anxiety, no indictment of wealth, no LGBTQ subplot, no neurodivergent character, no revisionist reading of history. The cast is diverse and the film declines to comment on the fact. The result is a competently bittersweet sequel that aspires to very little beyond making its audience cry in the dark, and largely succeeds.