UPDATE: Friend group recruited for Coral’s “free wedding” learns the real reason is the groom wants to use the budget to buy a sailboat: ‘Very useful and practical thing to have when you are living in the city!’

Everyone in the friend circle gets a job when Coral's wedding goes from Pinterest board to communal labor camp. A free party for a hundred, organized by volunteers and disguised as a celebration, quickly morphs into a test of friendship, patience, and culinary improvisation. Bride Coral pitches the vision, Groom Basil hides the real motive, and one poor soul gets handed not just bakery duty, but the responsibility for restoring everyone's emotional balance after the big reveal: the savings are earmarked for a sailboat.  

Volunteering in Coral's free wedding dream means signing up for the privilege of watching a groom price out fiberglass hulls while his fiancée attempts to swallow her seasickness and her disappointment. There's no wedding planner, just an unpaid staff of hopefuls juggling catering logistics and existential dread. Basil sells adventure, but what the crowd's actually buying is a one-way ticket to punchline purgatory, where every RSVP is sort of like a cry for help. 

Anyone hoping for romance finds themselves mediating a crisis instead, pressed to cheerlead a plan they privately dread. There's not much poetry in seeing a cake decorator forced to double as diplomatic envoy, smoothing over marital fantasies with buttercream and nervous half-truths. On some level, it's impressive: the only thing more elaborate than Coral's free wedding is Basil's ability to convince a crowd to pretend it's a good idea. Eventually, not even the band volunteers can drown out the sound of the lifeboats being lowered.