In what feels like a record year for the number of new Christmas movies being unwrapped on the big and mostly small screens, it takes a certain extra sparkle to make one feel worthy of our time. The welcome return of Lindsay Lohan was the mild elevation that Netflix’s otherwise aggressively anonymous Falling for Christmas needed. David Harbour’s theatrically released Violent Night moved past its been-there-seen-that badder Santa set-up with wince-inducing R-rated violence. Apple’s splashy, star-led musical Spirited took the bones of A Christmas Carol and found a new, if annoying, way to add some fresh flesh. In Amazon’s exhaustingly eager Britcom Your Christmas or Mine?, one might struggle to see why our time is even half-demanded here rather than elsewhere, a hackneyed grab-bag of sitcom cliches that ends up feeling more like tired pantomime.
After we follow a distractingly ugly CG snowflake glide through some even uglier CG clouds, we land at Marylebone station and on a young student couple James (Sex Education’s Asa Butterfield, flatter than the film requires) and Hayley (Cora Kirk, fizzier than the film deserves) as they face being away from each other for Christmas. They prepare for their respective train journeys but a sudden burst of romance has them deciding to surprise the other and they end up finding themselves alone with a family they’ve never met before for the big day while keeping their relationship secret. Farce ensues.
