(courtesy IMDb)
There’s a strange disconnect that can emerge when you’re consuming festively themed pop culture – for instance, you might be perfectly fine with reading endlessly escapist, coincidence-full rom-com novels but find their Hallmark equivalents to be a Christmassy bridge too far.
You know there’s a strange kind of dissonance at work there, almost a snobbery of sorts, but you can’t quite make yourself watch the movie equivalent of the books you love and which bring you so much joy.
And the one day a streaming service, newly engorged on imports of the Hallmark Christmas films you’ve purport to find too fantastically OTT and trite to stand, advertising a movie that looks like it could be fun and you plunge in and suddenly, somehow, you are loving the very thing you once said you could never truly enjoy.
The movie in question, it will surprise you not a jot to learn, is 2022’s Haul Out the Holly, which along with its soon-to-be-watched-and-reviewed sequel, turns out to be just the right kind of watch for a home alone Saturday night – your better half is off watching actual theatre – along with three-quarters of a bottle of rosé wine and some fun, furiously-paced texting with your bestie.
Of course, like all the stories resident in the burgeoning festive genre, where redemption and seasonal existential rehab are the great themes, Haul Out the Holly is well and truly full of plot holes big enough to drive a truck full of Santa light displays through and the sort of romantic contrivances that would have your friends rushing to make sure you weren’t the object of some weird kind of seasonal mind control or brainwashing experiments.
And yes, the fact that no one dares to take the Home Owners’ Association (HOA) to court is startling; after all, if you had someone giving you citations for not being Christmassy enough, which is what happens to a newly arrived back in town Emily (Lacey Chabert) when childhood friend, overly zealous HOA president and all-but-certain love interest Jared (Wes brown) cites her for failing to decorate her parents home in time for a week of incredibly intense snowman competitions and cookie baking contests.
Rather than challenging what is in all honesty some weirdly cult-like behaviour, and this is observed as someone who loves Christmas and will go to great lengths to decorate for the fun of the season – the key word there is “fun” which pretty much every homeowner in the place seems have lost sight of, though Haul Out the Holly begs to differ on that point – Emily, who is fiercely resistant at first, with some pithy put-downs of the strange Stepford Wives behaviour, decides to go along with it.
Is it love? Alien slugs controlling her mind? Is it a need to fit in and belong, after a recent, barely there break-up? Who can say, but what we do know is that all normal standards of human critical thinking are abandoned in favour of joining the light-switching, 36-inch Nutcracker statue-placing (yes, they measure them!) crowd and becoming, instead of its chief critic, its main cheerleader and source of emotional support.
The thing is, and yes, maybe it’s the rosé or maybe it is indeed strange, cheesy Christmas-loving alien slugs infecting your cerebral cortex, but somehow all this preposterous behaviour and unnerving fast transitions to queen of the festively decorating hordes, not to mention the unwillingness to challenge clearly negligent parents (played by Peter Jacobson and Ellen Travolta) for prioritising decorating the neighbourhood over celebrating Christmas properly as a family, somehow ends up feeling gloriously escapist and quite delightfully fun.
Maybe the Invasion of the Body Snatchers: festive edition vibe percolating through proceedings of this highly enjoyable and gloriously diversionary piece of festive fluff has somehow reached across the digital divide between memory banks and viewer but Haul Out the Holly seems to have the power to make you suspend all belief, and there’s some industrial levels of suspending necessary to make this work, and to actually lean in and enjoy watching Emily find her place with new friends and neighbours Pamela (Melissa Peterman) and madcap eccentric Ned (Stephen Tobolowsky), and naturally, fall head over heels in love with Jared who beneath the uncompromising HOA president exterior simply wants to be Santa.
The things with all of the Hallmark movies and their ilk, and indeed the novels this reviewer consumes like they are going out of fashion, is that for all the fanciful plot contrivances and OTT moments, what really sells a movie like Haul Out the Holly is that it, like the pop culture face of the whole festive season, offers exactly what we’re all after – an escape from a world where everyone acts like they’re supposed to act and where the demands of rationality and adult levels of responsibility play second fiddle to losing yourself in the magic of Christmas.
Now, granted, yes, in the case of Haul Out the Holly at least, they accomplish this by employing hyper-intense levels of regulations, rules and rituals, the kind that should in theory send you running for a small cabin in the woods where your only concession to the season is some wispy tinsel on a beleaguered pot plant.
How can more of the same stuff that makes day-to-day life so tiring suddenly have the opposite effect and make you feel all warm and fussy and gloriously Christmassy?
Is it the sheer zest of everyone pushing for the same decorative goal? All the sugar in the cookies? The hypnotic twinkling of enough festive lights to trigger climate change all on their own?
It’s hard to say, but just like Emily, you enter a critic and emerge a fervent supporter, a lover of Christmas and a lighter-than-air viewer who might see plot holes aplenty and weird emotional shifts by the metric ton of fruit mince pieces and eggnog, and yet who chooses to believe (there really is a Santa Claus, Virginia!) and willingly sign up to watch the sequel on the next weekend, the strangely convincing but highly enjoyable magic of Haul Out the Holly somehow working its charm quite against all expectations.