I didn’t really grow up on classic Christmas films: in the 1980s and 90s, South African TV programmers alternated between pickingMary Poppins or The Sound of Music for the main Christmas Day slot, and that was that. Neither film was specifically holiday-themed, yet for years, Julie Andrews was to me the face of Christmas – far more so than Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life or Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone.
These days, however, I can see that the Christmas movie canon has several divisions, primed to different generations and sensibilities: for a certain millennial bracket, 00s comedies such as Elf and Love Actually are classics, though they don’t give more sentimental traditionalists the warm and fuzzies the way golden age Hollywood titles such as Meet Me in St Louis or The Shop Around The Corner do. A more ironic set has embraced the knowing shoddiness of Netflix’s recent factory line of straight-to-streaming festive products.
And then there’s the bracket of anti-Christmas cinema: films that feature Yuletide either as a backdrop or a story element but don’t abound in cheery, chintzy holiday spirit. The “Die Hard is a Christmas classic” argument stopped being funny or original years ago, but its proponents have successfully cemented it into the culture. Similarly, if on the opposite end of the tonal spectrum, Todd Haynes’s exquisitely melancholic December-set romance Carol has become firmly entrenched as the epicure’s alternative festive pick. And only barely alternative: with its swooningly romantic finale, the film still qualifies as feel-good seasonal viewing.
My favourite off-theme seasonal films include Zach Clark’s flinty black comedy White Reindeer, which begins on a challengingly bleak note with its clean-cut protagonist finding her husband brutally murdered days before Christmas. As she uncovers his hidden life and meets the sex worker he was seeing on the side, it comes around to a curious sense of hope and community. Speaking of sex workers, the same goes for Tangerine, Sean Baker’s lively, ribald study of trans sisterhood over the course of a chaotic Christmas Eve on the pavements of LA.
There’s not much hope in Stanley Kubrick’s lavishly gilded Eyes Wide Shut, an odyssey of sexual frustration amid the bustle of wintry New York festivities, but it does feel strangely cosy to me. Nicole Kidman gave it a tonal bookend with last year’s Babygirl, which likewise balanced kink and tinsel in a tale of year-end friskiness. If you prefer your anti-Christmas films a little more epic in scale, David Lowery’s gorgeous Arthurian quest The Green Knight fits the bill, kicking off as it does on a fateful Christmas morning, though it features more beheading than you may wish to follow your turkey dinner. And if you like your Noel on the lean and mean side however, the film noir genre offers a surprising number of hardboiled thrillers with a yuletide setting. The lushest of them is LA Confidential, in which the real-life 1951 “Bloody Christmas” police brutality scandal sets the whole plot in motion. Its festive ambience is limited, but it’s a treat on any day.
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Less well-known and not available on regular streaming platforms, though free to watch via the Internet Archive, is Blast of Silence, a ruthless, inkily atmospheric 1961 B-movie (left)that follows an embittered hitman who’s very much working over the holiday in Manhattan. The grim work in question is contrasted with a marvellously vibrant, authentic sense of jubilant, illuminated city street life. Plus, it’s only 77 minutes long, offering you your best shot at actually finishing a Christmas movie before sliding into a boozy food coma. Merry Christmas, one and all.