The holidays: gathering around the fireplace, kissing under the mistletoe, a break from the grind. But for some of us who are far from home, the Christmas season amplifies what we are missing both personally and collectively. There’s a tension in the air, simmering in the background. Such is the case with Yule cinema.
The Christmas film is part of many people’s celebrations – A Christmas Story, It’s A Wonderful Life, Home Alone and more. But what about the films that help us dismantle the aforementioned complexities of the festive season? Cinema that reflects upon our sins, lack of faith and yearning for the ones we love: behold the anti-Christmas film. There is a plethora of seasonal movies that make way for a realm of feelings that aren’t the warm-and-fuzzies of Miracle on 34th Street. These versions of the season give their Father Christmas figures a sense of exhausting hubris.
The temporal aspect of cinema can resonate like no other art form, and during the cold months there can be found some solace in the small cathartic glow of movies that don’t sugarcoat the tricky elements of Yuletide’s loaded gun. For example: skip past the Hallmark flicks and cut to a fuzzy pink room. It feels cosy inside as the Christmas tree lights flicker, but on the floor lies a dead body. This is the mise en scene of Morvern Callar (D: Lynne Ramsay, 2002).
It’s Christmas day, and supermarket worker Morvern has woken up in her small seaside town in Scotland to find her boyfriend’s body, alongside a manuscript, suicide note, mixtape and posthumous instructions. This isn’t Ramsay’s first crack at dark Christmas; before this masterpiece of 21st-century filmmaking, she also made the 1999 short film Gasman, which uses a child’s gaze – a young girl at a Christmas party who sees the darkness hidden in her father’s personal affairs – to explore lost innocence.
Another favourite is the tender melancholy of Todd Haynes’ 2015 Carol, which draws its 50s melodrama inspiration from German filmmaker Douglas Sirk. Haynes has spent a lot of his career paying homage to Sirk, and Carol has all the Christmas bittersweetness and angst of snow-laden love letters and familial drama.
Alternately, swap out all that pine-scented nostalgia for the sound of carollers in Bridget Jones Diary (D: Sharon Maguire, 2001) as Renée Zellweger and her onscreen father, Jim Broadbent, sit mutually heartbroken, smoking cigarettes and yelling out the window for the singers to “bog off” (the chosen obscenity of the British upper middle class).
Or travel to Manhattan’s Upper East Side, which in Whit Stillman’s Metropolis (1990) plays hosts to smug debutantes searching for love and connection amid the wintry beauty of New York at Christmas. In John Landis’ Trading Places (1983), these same city blocks are the setting for a raucous Christmastime role reversal, in which affluent commodities broker Louis Winthorpe III, portrayed by Dan Aykroyd, and destitute street hustler Billy Ray Valentine, played by Eddie Murphy, do as the title suggests and swap lives.
However dated the film may be, it’s a great turn from Murphy, and a particular scene in a train gives off a hectic energy that suits the intensity of the Christmas season pretty well. Of course, it doesn’t have to be Christmas itself on screen to be something you’d want to watch through the holidays. Sometimes just the frost is enough – like the opening shot of the Coen Brothers’ eerie epic Fargo and its snowy, bloody opening scene, setting the stage for an ice-cold thriller.
There are also plenty of flicks to introduce a little comedy into the mix, if slapstick or stoner is more your holiday vibe than roasting chestnuts and falling snow; Adam Sandler’s 2002 Eight Crazy Nights or Seth Rogan’s The Night Before will do the trick. But whether you’re into horror backlit by frosted fairy lights or tinsel with a side of family tension, there’s lots to enjoy in this sub-sub genre of cinema, which can be a companion and a refreshing retake on the classic vibes of Christmas.
