Happiest Season review, Culture Whisper
Christmas movies ebb and flow onto our screens every year, usually the same ones. And it’s mostly in that familiar, traditional formula that they’re rolled out. A syrupy romance and a silly plot is pretty much guaranteed. The conservatism of the genre can, therefore, be resistant to change.
Happiest Season, however, has its Christmas cake and eats it too. Actor Clea DuVall’s second film as director retains all the hyperbolic pleasures of an OTT festive Hollywood film, but adds an inclusive twist – the central romance being between two lesbian women.
Not that the film hammers home that point. At the start, Abby (Kristen Stewart) and Harper (Mackenzie Davis) are treated as a normal, loving couple, surrounded in clusters of Christmas movie clichés. The loud decorations, the inflatable snowmen, the Santa statues, the trees, the tinsel… You can’t help but relate to Abby’s disdain for the holiday season and loathe Harper’s sweet enthusiasm for it.
