Hectic Holidays
Family Christmas reunions are an absolute nightmare – and not enough filmmakers are brave enough to admit that. With her debut feature Silent Night, Camille Griffin finally brings the truth to light once again, allowing Sabastian Astley to celebrate the best Anti-Christmas films to help us survive this time of year.
Everyone has a favourite Christmas film: it might be an older classic like The Shop around the Corner or Miracle on 34th Street or something of our own lifetime like Elf, Love Actually or The Muppets Christmas Carol. Many families might even have a film-based tradition locked into their festive schedule.
What draws us into a traditional Christmas film is the warmth and love it emanates, celebrating from themes of community, family and joyful celebration conquering all. It can feel like tapping into a maple tree of positivity and scooping up the purely, sickly sap that trickles out of them.
But over the last few decades, a counter-canon to the cinematic Christmas celebration has formed in a few key titles: Gremlins, Die Hard, Jack Frost, Silent Night Deadly Night. If Christmas films spark love and joy, these anti-Christmas films invite horror and discomfort, perverting the festive sentimentality that fuels the engine of the traditional Christmas flick. While these films could seem like the last thing Christmas needs, films like Camille Griffin’s debut feature Silent Night expose the hidden truth about the heart of Christmas family reunions: they’re an absolute nightmare, and it’s far from the most wonderful time of the year.
Set against the backdrop of an oncoming climate disaster, Keira Knightley’s Nell and her extended family gather together for a final Christmas, pretending all is well in a crude festive illusion that soon goes awry. Nell’s home quickly becomes a blithesome battlefield, with expletives shot back and forth at an incredible rate.
Secrets are uncorked and spilled like mulled wine – sisters revealing their life-long lust for their otherwise engaged friends from university, arguments boiling over into screaming matches between parents and children. Griffin explained her story was essentially “Love Actually meets Melancholia”, and it makes sense.
Christmas is so often described as a wonderful, all-encompassing time of peace and joy, overcoming barriers and prejudices – but who has actually had a Christmas like that? You don’t see Buddy the Elf making a racist remark about immigration, or Jimmy Stewart’s daughter being slut-shamed for having a nose piercing. Christmas films indulge in a totalizing sentiment connecting everyone, as though every problem suddenly disappears just for that week. Children of divorce will know their parents don’t magically love each other just for a day or two – Santa can deliver a million presents in one night, but can’t fix the fissures in their relationship.
An attachment to Christmas films is often formed in childhood, which is also when the illusion of the holiday is most powerful; once Santa’s out of the bag, you begin to notice the bickering, hushed arguments down corridors and strained relationships that once were obscured by gigantic presents to marvel at.
Nell’s family seem close in their initial introductions, but quickly the cracks reveal themselves, growing inch by inch as the annual excavation of the ancient past occurs, as is so common at family reunions. I’ve had a grand total of one extended family Christmas reunion, while in the midst of a fever-induced fugue state – the result was some kind of horribly bland nightmare, forced to make strained pleasantries with people I’d never met, not understanding our relationship if we even had one.
Anti-Christmas films are often deemed inappropriate for the festive season. Chris Peckover’s Better Watch Out horrorizes that one child who somehow gets away with being absolutely awful on Christmas because, “They’re just a kid”.
There’s the isolation many face over the holidays in Tim Burton’s Batman Returns, following the people that Christmas leaves behind; Cobblepot, Batman, Catwoman are all without families during the season and must form twisted interactions with one another. Stanley Kubrick takes a stab at rampant Christmas consumerism in Eyes Wide Shut, emphasizing the vice-like grip it has over the season, infesting every echelon of society and adding a layer of yuletide perversion through its infection into the occultist elite.
There are even Anti-Christmas films for those who despise the holiday with Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa, a figure for those thoroughly disillusioned by Christmas, sick of the endless facades, repetitive jingles and false niceties, simply attempting to work through it as quickly as possible. Silent Night feels like the perfect Anti-Christmas film because it knowingly reverses the all-encompassing sugary Christmas sentiment – Griffin brings every problem and flaw to the fore, smashing them together like baubles falling from the tree.
Unsurprisingly, Griffin was inspired by Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit (which also stars her son Roman Griffin Davis, playing the lead character in her own feature debut), an anti-war film similarly criticized for its inappropriate tone and approach to the portrayal of its material, also beloved by many for its bold vision.
Anti-Christmas films are far more relatable, because the people involved don’t suddenly become perfect, angelic beings – they’re still awful and flawed, it just happens to be Christmas. Nell’s family, middle-class as they may be with their stolen Waitrose sticky toffee puddings, speak to that pressure cooker image of families trapped together under one roof. Decades-old sibling aggression, uncomfortable feigns of ignorance over familial dirty laundry; everyone is one Christmas cracker from each other’s throats.
This is the true essence of Christmas, something typically feelgood Christmas films forget, pushing an artificial narrative many can’t see their own holiday memories within. These transmit feelings of what Christmas should be, poisoning our own unique celebrations. Silent Night’s Christmas is one we can relate to (apocalypse aside), almost painfully so.
There’s no secret magic that reunites the family and makes everyone happy, rather a celebration that spirals into an abject nightmare of screaming, shocking revelations and uncomfortable silence. Anti-Christmas films ironically offer a comforting blanket of “It’s okay, Christmas can be awful, it’s not just you.” It removes the pressure to have a good time. This year, give yourself the gift of knowing your messy feelings about the holidays are completely valid, and the Christmas we see on TV is, too often, nothing more than sugar-coated bullshit.
Silent Night is in UK cinemas now.
Sab Astley is a freelance entertainment and culture journalist based in London UK,. He's often found cooking in the kitchen or at his desk cooking up pitches, looking for that perfect flavour to serve up. You can find him on Twitter for dumb film jokes, book recommendations and the odd insight or two.
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