Silent Night earns a place as one of the best films of the year and one of the best modern Christmas films, period – its danse macabre between Christmassy spirit and collective suicide is fantastically inspired, with a delightful cornucopia of actors deftly executing Griffin’s sharp, comic script to perfection. Silent Night is available to rent, buy or stream.
Nothing says the end of the world like being home for the holidays with the whole family, right? That’s how Keira Knightley’s Nell sees it, hosting a final festive Christmas gathering on the eve of an apocalyptic waste cloud ravaging the UK. Fortunately, a UK-wide painless pill has been issued to prevent what’s sure to be a horrific death if they can stop from tearing one another apart first.
Camille Griffin’s distinct approach to a festive film focuses less on the traditional ‘happy family at Christmas time’ and tells what many understand to be an unspoken truth: sometimes, Christmas with your family is an absolute nightmare. It’s an approach that’s welcomed as part of a small but solid sub-genre of ‘anti-Christmas’ films in the company of Better Watch Out and Gremlins.
We all buy into the illusion of perfect peace at Christmastime, often choosing to ignore the hushed arguments echoing down corridors and secrets spilt after too much wine. Her cavalcade includes Nell’s increasingly frustrated husband Simon (Matthew Goode) and their hilariously argumentative son Art (played by the ever-charming Roman Griffin Davis), sisters Bella (Lucy Punch) and Sandra (Annabelle Wallis), with their own big personalities in tow. Outside of our immediate family, there’s Sandra’s husband Tony (Rufus Jones) – the pure embodiment of a milquetoast man; dashing university friend James (Ṣọpẹ Dìrísù), and Bella’s girlfriend Alex (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) and James’ girlfriend Sophie (Lily-Rose Depp).
It’s quite possibly the greatest ensemble for a Christmas film since Love Actually, with every performer bringing their A-game. Somehow, Griffin is able to make every single performer stand out and shine in their own way – Matthew Goode’s comedic timing is impeccable, and Punch and Wallis are stellar choices for the outspoken sisters.
Nell’s family house turns into a blithesome battlefield, with expletives shot back and forth at one another at an incredible rate as secrets are uncorked. It’s a bristling pressure cooker of macabre humour as we gradually learn that the family has fully settled into the inevitability of their apocalyptic ends, attempting to cope with it in their own way. Some seek a long-sought-after end-of-the-world carnal celebration, whilst others simply want to play a game of Scrabble and forget about it. At one point, Simon and Tony return from robbing a Waitrose for its entire supply of sticky toffee puddings and are celebrated as champions of the world! If you’re facing the end of the world, you can’t do it without a good pudding.
Griffin’s world is built with a calculated focus on containing this apocalyptic event within a grounded context – there are government websites with startlingly clear depictions of how the toxic gas will gradually destroy you, and the deceptively over-the-counter packaging of ‘The Pill’ is disarmingly hilarious. There’s a slight socio-political subtext that Griffin sneaks into her script, cunningly so, with climate change as the origin of the gas cloud, alongside a fair mistrust of the government – “Of course, I don’t trust them, they killed Diana!” Still, despite the hilarity, Griffin is able to conjure a palpable, creeping existential dread into this middle-class family.
There’s an impossible scale to the gas cloud that feels monolithic, certainly unstoppable as it wrecks through desolate images of London – for a moment, you do forget you’re watching a black Christmas comedy and feel like it’s a deleted scene from The Day After Tomorrow. This dread is skilfully inhabited by each of the family members, trying their utmost to maintain that iconic British stiff upper lip but gradually cracking, revealing their immense fear or paralyzing fright – the children watching their parents unravel is particularly disturbing, as it feels all too real; they can’t understand death, but they can understand the one beacon in their life shutting down, leaving them lost.
The key essence of the horror that Griffin plays with throughout Silent Night is the inevitability of it, and the contrast between the adults and the children. That eternal disconnect of them being unable to understand loss and death, whilst the adults are forced to confront their own mortality, whilst pretending it’s not even happening. In a way, the cloud has already suffocated the household with anxiety – it’s just a much slower death than what’s to come. This existential dread is tactically balanced by Griffin with hilarity so that it never becomes overwhelmingly tragic – if there’s melodrama, it’s played for laughs, knowingly executed to uplift some true gallows humour.
Silent Night earns a place as one of the best films of the year and one of the best modern Christmas films, period – its danse macabre between Christmassy spirit and collective suicide is fantastically inspired, with a delightful cornucopia of actors deftly executing Griffin’s sharp, comic script to perfection.
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