Silent Night, Holy fright!
Now being served: Keira’s stodgy Christmas pudding, a very cheesy romcom and a big fat Netflix turkey
Silent Night (15, 92 mins) Verdict: Wrapping-paper thin ★★III
Boxing Day (12A, 109 mins) Verdict: Love Actually rip-off ★★III A Castle For Christmas (PG, 98 mins) Verdict: A sleigh-crash
WE’VE nudged into December, the traditional cue for film distributors to nudge Santa down the chimney and pretend it’s already Christmas. And so, or possibly lo, as if borne by three wise men getting their journey times slightly wrong, there arrives this week a trio of Christmas films, none of which brings much comfort, still less joy.
Silent Night marks the debut of writer-director Camille Griffin, whose real-life son Roman Griffin Davis (Jojo Rabbit) plays Art, a pottymouthed child understandably alarmed by a forthcoming poison-cloud apocalypse and not wholly reassured by a Government-sponsored mass-suicide scheme designed to avoid unnecessary suffering (pills available from Exit.gov.co.uk).
That’s the premise, with the added zinger that this global Armageddon arrives at Christmas, with Art’s parents Nell (Keira Knightley, inset) and Simon (Matthew Goode) determined to make the most of their imminent demise by hosting a gathering of dear old chums in the grand country home lent by her mother (Trudie Styler, who gets a fleeting Zoom cameo).
Obviously, indeed rather too obviously, there are satirical messages in all this about our own pandemic, and about climate change. In fairness, a few good ideas pulsate gently at the heart of the film. But it unfolds like an undergraduate revue sketch stretched well beyond its natural life, and the social/ sexual politics of the middleclass house party are almost unbearably shallow and contrived, not to mention derivative, awakening queasy memories of Peter’s Friends (1992).
Silent Night is further undermined by characterisation thinner than cheap festive wrapping paper, as a bunch of caricatures tick diversity boxes of sexuality and ethnicity, and the kids swear like troopers (the cast includes young Roman’s even younger twin brothers) to tick a further box marked edginess. Boxing Day, proclaimed as the UK’s first Christmas romcom with a mostly black cast, isn’t much better.
It, too, is a debut effort, with actor Aml Ameen not just writing and directing for the first time but also starring as Melvin, a wildly successful British novelist living in Los Angeles, who nervously brings his lovely American fiancée Lisa (Aja Naomi King) back to London to experience his Anglo-Caribbean family’s traditionally fraught Boxing Day gathering.
Soon, they are both plunged into an emotional melee caused by simmering family resentments and his own abrupt break-up with ex-girlfriend Georgia (Leigh-Anne Pinnock, of the girl band Little Mix), who now happens to be a terrifically famous pop star.
Inevitably, Lisa, without knowing
Melvin’s romantic connection, is a huge fan. Perhaps especially for those of us faintly allergic to Love Actually (2003), which Boxing Day conspicuously echoes, none of this is particularly engaging.
There are some strong performances (notably by Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Melvin’s mother) and yet, even though the story is apparently semiautobiographical, almost all the relationships seem synthetic, making both the comedy and the poignancy feel forced.
Still, Boxing Day and even Silent Night are true masterpieces alongside the Netflix film A Castle For Christmas, a sleighcrash of bad acting, idiotic plotting and terrible dialogue, and the first cinematic turkey of the season.
BROOKE Shields dishes up a great slab of overboiled Christmas ham as Sophie Brown, a bestselling U.S.-based author (yup, another one) who somehow appears to have built a colossal fortune on the back of sentences such as ‘The well whispered a secret to her longing heart’.
Anyway, eager to escape a hue and cry caused by her decision to kill off her romantic lead, Sophie legs it to the cutesy Aberdeenshire village from which her father sensibly emigrated decades earlier to find that the miserably bad-tempered but appealingly floppy-haired 12th Duke of Dunbar (Cary Elwes) is in dire financial straits and might be persuaded to sell his ancestral home.
Mary Lambert’s film, the kind of production that makes you weep for all the excellent projects that never get financing, cobbles together a flimsy theme park version of Scotland clearly intended to charm a not-very-discerning U.S. audience.
The whole thing is full of calculatedly eccentric locals (who, despite their porridge-oats Scottishness, sprinkle their sentences with convenient Americanisms such as ‘cellphone’ and ‘stickshift’) and mock-jolly ceilidhs, as well as a dog called Hamish who, in truth, is one of the better actors on show.
The plot, like Shields herself, is as wooden as a caber.
Sophie and Myles (the irascible ‘dook’) can’t stand each other at first, then fall in love, then have an all-bets-are-off barney... and then, well, let’s just say that it’s all something of a Hamish’s breakfast — not so much Local Hero as Local Zero.
SilEnt night and Boxing Day are in cinemas now; A Castle For Christmas is available to stream on netflix.