Happiest Season

Dir: Clea DuVall (1hr 42mins) (12)

★★★★

The first ever “mainstream LGBT+ Christmas film”, Clea DuVall’s new “festive romcom” is a

“relishable piece of Yuletide joy”, said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent. Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis star as twentysomething couple Abby and Harper, who go to spend Christmas with Harper’s parents in a small conservative town. On the way , Harper reveals that she hasn’t yet come out to her family, and can’t now because her father (Victor Garber) is running for mayor on a family-values ticket, and it might risk scandal. Abby agrees to play the role of a straight friend – but the challenge proves tougher than she’d bargained for.

Happiest Season embraces “all the Christmas romcom clichés” and invests them with “new vibrancy”, said Kevin Maher in The Times. DuVall has created an “extraordinary array of characters”, each “rich, complex and utterly credible”, including Harper’s two sisters – brittle Sloane (Alison Brie) and the aspiring fantasy-novelist Jane (Mary Holland). And, crucially, the chemistry between Davis and Stewart is palpable, culminating in the most moving romcom declaration of love in recent years. I found the film moderately enjoyable, said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times – but felt the story had a fatal flaw, namely that, for Harper, pretending to be straight would surely be “incredibly practised”, not to say “depressingly ordinary”. Happiest Season wins big points for trying something new. “The surprise is that it doesn’t stand out more.”

Available on Apple, Google, Sky and Amazon.