Review: ‘That Christmas’ is a surprisingly, subtly ambitious holiday tale full of growing pains and winning attitudes

Most everyone, by way of the Western holiday industrial complex, is well-acquainted with Christmas as a holiday, but it’s not often we actively acknowledge Christmas as a film genre. Indeed, whether it’s the straighter shooters of Elf and A Christmas Story, multigenre mashups like Violent Night and The Nightmare Before Christmas, or whatever variation of A Christmas Carol we’re on at this point, the Christmas movie pantheon is about as expansive as any.

How did it get to be so? Well, the Christmas spirit — one of forgiveness, love for the sake of love, and forsaken cynicism — can be used as both a nutritional creative foundation and an excuse to phone that creativity in, and therefore attracts artists of varying degrees of sincerity. The majority of Christmas films find themselves in the middle, not particularly zeroed in on either intention and mostly just here for a good time.

That Christmas — Netflix‘s upcoming animated Christmas film written by Richard Curtis and based on his trilogy of children’s books That Christmas and Other Stories — is one of those films, though not for a lack of trying. Indeed, there is an abundantly clear thesis of sincerity in Simon Otto’s directorial debut, and while there’s a creakiness to the storytelling and dialogue that weighs it down not-insignificantly, That Christmas ultimately comes out in the green thanks to sharp animation, endearing character dynamics, and the untraditional swing taken by Curtis and his co-writer Peter Souter.

That Christmas stars Brian Cox (Succession) as Santa Claus, who happens upon the small English town of Wellington-on-Sea, where the holidays have taken a slightly calamitous turn for its residents. There’s Danny Williams, the shy, lonely boy who forms an unlikely friendship with his school’s ruthless headmaster Miss Trapper (Fiona Shaw); Sam Beccles, an anxious young girl who’s always worrying after her troublemaking twin Charlie; and Bernie McNutt, who’s enlisted by her folks to watch over a group of the town’s children when their parents find themselves trapped in a ditch on Christmas Eve. In the days leading up to Christmas, their predicaments become entangled as love and togetherness take center stage in this sleepy little town.

The film opens to a rather epic set piece involving Santa Claus flying through an intense blizzard, having apparently lost all his reindeer except for the robust Dasher as he soars towards Wellington-on-Sea. Putting aside the gonzo implication that not all the reindeer survived the journey (a premise that could have been its own film, but is never addressed again here), this is a visually demanding note to kick things off on, but it’s one that’s animated and choreographed quite beautifully. The rest of the film isn’t nearly as busy, and so it has very little trouble rising to the occasion of being nice to look at, and there’s something to be said about that particular promise being made right from the get-go.

Unfortunately, it goes in the other direction as well. Just as the opening scene promises some nice visuals, it also promises dialogue that doesn’t stick the landing. Even outside of Santa’s narration, far too often the characters seem to be speaking to the audience rather than each other, explaining what’s happening in the moment and why they and other characters are the way they are.

In all likelihood, this was done to accommodate the film’s inevitable younger viewers, who the decorated Curtis has comparatively little experience making movies for. This is regrettably balanced out by a fair shake of contrived one-liners that never really land; the language is too pleasant to be anything other than corny, and the film’s untraditional storytelling — a strength in most every other respect — means there’s no recognizable tension for the jokes to operate in. Indeed, as a comedy outing, That Christmas is far from all that.

And yet, this is largely okay, because the film seems to understand that its strength lies in its heart rather than its jokes, and that’s where the untraditional storytelling structure bears its fruit. Plot-wise, That Christmas is pretty haphazard as it moves from story beat to story beat, but it makes no secret of the fact that it’s less interested in telling a straight story than being a lighthearted and surprisingly complex mosaic of the Christmas spirit; one that not only understands the joy of community, but also the pain of its absence, and how the pronounced emotion inherent to Christmas can make both of those things grow.

To that point, whenever the characters get to engage with each other instead of us audience members, that sweetness and melancholy both come to life in a pretty big way. This is perhaps best captured in the relationship between Danny and his mother, who have a sticky-note communication system that single-handedly informs us of the bond and situation they share, serving as a slick conduit for the emotion That Christmas wants us to feel.

And, at the end of the day, that emotion is felt often enough. Sam and Charlie’s sisterly, look-out-for-each-other dynamic is a relatively remarkable emotional core in its own right, with every revelation in the twins’ story peeling back a layer we didn’t know was there (although some of these revelations are smoother than others). Bernie the babysitter, meanwhile, does most of the heavy lifting in calling attention to That Christmas‘ unconventional modus operandi, serving as a leader for the film in equal measure as she does for the children she’s looking after; she directs the school play (itself an untraditional spin on the Christmas tale), and proceeds to break tradition when the planning of household festivities fall to her.

She makes mistakes, goes out of her way to make up for them, and ultimately drags everything over the finish line, and that’s precisely what That Christmas does as well. It won’t be remembered among the best and most famous holiday features, nor will it thrive on the back of a niche audience. But as an honest, family-friendly exercise in Christmas as a film genre, it’s hard to deny its merit, and viewers can see for themselves when That Christmas hits Netflix on Dec. 4.