Horror Movie Review: The Christmas Spirit (2023)

Written and directed by Bennet De Brabandere, and starring Matia Jackett, Zion Forrest Lee, and Nicolas Grimes, The Christmas Spirit is a hard film to love. On the surface, it’s an entertaining and touching festive tale about forgiveness, but below that is a very messy story, odd character choices, and a lack of comedic moments, which wouldn’t be so much of a problem except it’s billed as a horror comedy.

The story revolves around Cole, who has spent the last twenty years burying the trauma of his sister’s death, which he was blamed for. So traumatic was this experience, which occurred at Christmas, that the Christmas Spirit was summoned, but got trapped inside Cole’s mind.

Taking the form of a muscle-bound wrestling luchador, the Spirit is trapped and the only way for it to get free is for Cole to ‘sacrifice’ someone. Which Cole refuses to do, preferring to live a life of isolation and refusing to accept that the Christmas Spirit is anything but his own madness and grief from what happened to his sister.

This has resulted in a lot of tension between the Christmas Spirit and Cole, as the former has had no choice but to sit back and watch the world lose what makes Christmas so important. It needs to be free, and while browsing not-Instagram, it sees an opportunity to force Cole to confront his past and make the sacrifice needed. A young influencer named Maggie, who has lost her own Christmas spirit after catching her mother in bed with someone who isn’t her father, and just so happens to look exactly like Cole’s deceased sister.

All Cole needs to do is kidnap her and recreate the events that lead to his sister’s death. That should be easy, right?

Cue many hi-jinks that should be quite funny, but often end up being awkward as the only way for it to work is for characters to behave like brain dead morons. Which would have been fine for Cole but is unacceptable for the Maggie character who seems incapable of spotting danger when it’s literally taping her hands up in the back of a van.

This is just one many head-scratching scenes that could have worked with just a slight character pivot. Namely, having Maggie actually want to get kidnapped as a way of getting back at her mother. Something she does want to pretend to do, making a bad video with Cole to imply it, but when it turns into a real kidnapping, she starts to freak out. So, what was with all the faces and looks leading up to the latter part of the film that seemed to suggest something more was going on?

This, alongside very confusing motivations for the Christmas Spirit, an unclear direction regarding the ‘sacrifice’, a pointless early scene where another character seems to see the Spirit implying something bigger again, an ending that is sweet, but unearned, and a load of secondary characters that make everything even messier. If all of this wasn’t frustrating enough, Christmas is almost non-existent (aside from people saying it’s that time of the year) and the latter part of the film takes place inside a dark and ugly garage. How festive.

Sure, this can be seen as the world having lost its Christmas spirit as it’s currently trapped inside Cole, but a bit of tinsel here and there would have at least brightened a few scenes up. Although we do get a festive looking neck stabiliser, at least.

All of this adds up a film that simply doesn’t hit the mark, heading downhill almost immediately, following a really intense first ten minutes. Yet, there’s still enjoyable things about it, such as the very good cast and the peppiness of the story, which helps keep it entertaining. It just could have been so much more, and that will be most people’s over-riding feeling come the end.