Lost At Christmas (2020)

It's Fort William. It's almost Christmas. Rob (Kenny Boyle) decides to get down on one knee and propose to the woman he has been in a relationship with since high school. She turns him down. Jen (Natalie Clark) decides to surprise a man she is in love with, taking a bag of gifts with her. She's upset to learn that he is happily settled in for the season with his wife. And so begins a typical tale of two mismatched strangers who head on a road trip, attempting to get home in time for Christmas. They can reach the village of Glencoe, and an inn populated by people who seem to be avoiding the usual Christmas festivities, but can they get any further?

Expanded from the 2015 short, Perfect Strangers, Lost At Christmas is a film that would be easier to dismiss if it wasn't working within the parameters of a standard Christmas movie. The character development is, well, it's thin on the ground, and everything that happens is done in a decidedly unrealistic, tick-the-tropes-checklist, way. But it's a Christmas movie, and everyone knows how I judge these movies differently from other types of movies.

Director Ryan Hendrick, who co-wrote the film with Clare Sheppard (both having worked together on the original short), wants to make something that adheres to the rules of this kind of thing, but only until he wants to commit a u-turn on things and show that the rules are there to be broken. Except . . . well, we very rarely watch Christmas movies to see the rules being broken. We watch them to know what we're getting. It's a testament to the quality of the film if it can impress and amuse viewers while working within the limitations of "the genre". Sticking to the rules until you don't want to just somehow feels like a cheat.

The leads do well in their roles, but Clark is the better of the two. She has the energy and enthusiasm, while trying to cover up her own pain for a lot of the runtime. Boyle is fine, but spends a lot of the film looking a bit too much like a cold Rick Astley to be completely likeable. The supporting cast is made up of a number of familiar Scottish faces, or faces familiar to Scottish viewers, including Sylvester McCoy, Sanjeev Kohli, and Clare Grogan. Frazer Hines also has fun in his role, the buddy of McCoy's character, both old men dispensing wisdom and wry asides whenever they're onscreen.

There are some laughs here and there, and the obligatory third act turnaround for people who have been resistant to the charms of Christmas, but the rest of the movie fails to follow on from a solid opening sequence. There isn't any major last-minute revelations, no tension is created (even though tension created in these movies is fleeting, as we know what needs to happen), and the very last scene . . . well, the less said about that the better. 

I still enjoyed this enough. I'll just never want to revisit it, and can't highly recommend it to others.

5/10

https://ko-fi.com/kevinmatthews