Having your festive viewing expectations subverted is a rare and precious thing indeed.
Much of the time in Christmas viewing land, what you see is what you get, and that is usually a good thing since you want fun, escapist entertainment with a heartwarming moral core, and that is precisely what you get.
Just what Santa ordered.
But sometimes, a film comes along that throws much of that expectation out of the window, doing so, it should be noted, in the guise of a film that looks like it’s going to be all sweet vibes and redemptive moments and nothing more.
Hot Frosty, directed by Jerry Ciccoritti to a screenplay written by Russell Hainline, looks for all the world like your average cookie-cutter Hallmark festive fest where utterly extraordinary things are accepted as a standard part of life simply because it is Christmas.
It’s set in a small town. Check. Has a pretty, popular but sad & lonely woman at its heart. Check. And it looks like whatever out-there premise the narrative rests on, in this case a muscular hot snowman – yes, yes, a contradiction in terms but bear with us here because MAGIC – is going to pan out to some sort of extremely happy, warm-and-fuzzy ending that restores our faith in humanity and wherever it else it may lacking. Check, check and check.
But here’s where all of those expectations, all of them welcome because when you’re a Christmasaholic, all of those tropes and cliches are voraciously embraced like getting that favourite joy on Christmas morning everybody wants, get happily and brilliantly subverted.
When the snowman named Jack (because of course he is), played with ripped sweetness by Dustin Milligan, springs to life after a world-weary widow, Kathy (Lacey Chabert) throws a magical red scarf around his neck – one given to her, it should be noted, by a dear friend Jane (Holly Hunter) who hopes it will bring Kathy true love, in much the same way it brought Jane her darling Theo; Kathy’s response? Leave it on a damn snowman – everything changes for the good people of the archetypal town in which he has been built in the quaint square.
So far, so Christmassy and no one is complaining because it’s executed with a sense of fun, real playfulness, some oblique nudity – Jack comes to life after a piece of flash photography and is, as you might expect, not overly clothed; okay he’s naked, people, he is naked and much mirth and merriment ensues as an older couple catch him full starkers – and a clearly telegraphed idea that real magic is at work.
At this point, you’re likely thinking, and reasonably understandably too, that Hot Frosty is playing by a fairly standard playbook and you will have a thoroughly light and frothy time and nothing more, your heart buoyed and your soul reminded of the wonder and laughter and joy of the season.
Mission perfectly accomplished.
But then Hot Frosty does something quite remarkable.
Woven into a smart, dialogue-rich script and some deliciously camp and silly performances – MVPs here include comically intense Sheriff Nathaniel Hunter (Craig Robinson) and Kathy’s BFF and local doctor Dottie (Katy Mixon Greer), hamming it up like Christmas dinner is mere minutes away and the feast is on the table – is some real, grounded and surprisingly affecting emotion.
In its guise as an escapist slice of festive fun, Hot Frosty actually dares to address the topic of grief and how losing someone you love can lay to waste everything you love in life and as Kathy notes in a heartfelt conversation with Jack, who in his garrulous naivety at being miraculously alive is the sweetest, most lovely, kind and caring man alive that Kathy needs to fall in love with, tilts off axis to a debilitating degree who you are without that person.
Kathy’s grief is not just some lazy narrative prop, and as Jack makes his boyishly sweet mark on the hearts of the townspeople, who ADORE him, and rightly so, and Kathy too (though she is understandably far more reluctant to embrace him, physically or emotionally), the two have discussions about what it means to love someone so much that losing them plays havoc with with your sense of self and how you want to live your life.
Refreshingly, Kathy, who is kind to Jack when others like the sheriff are not, doesn’t simply fall in love with Jack JUST … LIKE … THAT …, directly and impactfully contravening the idea, which many of these films routinely embrace, that grief is something light and inconvenient that can simply be shrugged off when something new and good comes along.
It’s far from that, and it’s messy, sad and very hard, and it doesn’t just fall away over time or when something new and vivaciously lovely comes along; rather, it sticks around, and while its effect on you may ebb, it never really leaves you and even years after the loss, you can still be mired in the crushing inertia that seized you when they first died.
Kathy is still in that place two years after her builder husband died, and her unkempt house and robotic adherence to routine is her way of coping with a life change so catastrophic that she still can’t work out a way forward.
Does Jack, in all his enthusiastic loving of life and its many possibilities (like travelling to Hawaii, which Kathy gently suggests, may not be the best idea for someone made of sentient snow) shake her grief-stricken inertia and bring her alive again?
Is Rudolph a charity member of Santa’s sleigh-pulling reindeer herd?
Of course Jack does, but he does so in a way, that while quite magical, suspension of belief necessary and gorgeously bonkers, feels far more grounded than just about any other festive film.
Hot Frosty will give you all the Christmas feels, and it will tick all the seasonally escapist boxes you may have, and then some, but as it does so, in a town that looks like a festive fantasy sprung happily to life, it acknowledges with unexpected depth of emotion and real sincerity what it means to be plunged into grief and to not be able to find your way out again, and how it takes something quite extraordinary, like an ambulant, caring, sharing, sweet and happy snowman sprung to life, to make life make sense again and to restore a sense that maybe there is living yet to be done, not just for Christmas but way beyond.
Hot Frosty streams on Netflix.