When I saw that there was going to be a movie this year called #Xmas, I took a deep breath and hoped it wasn’t going to be as stupid as it sounded. It probably could have been titled better.
Jen (Clare Bowen) owns her own interior design business with her sister, Ali (Anna Van Hooft). However, business is not going well. The women enter a contest run by mega-influencers, Zoe (Lillian Doucet-Roche) and Charlie (Sebastian Stewart). They pretend that Jen is married to her friend, Max (Brant Daugherty), and they have a baby, who is really Ali’s baby. When they become finalists and the influencers come to visit them, everything begins to fall apart.
I was slightly relieved as soon as I realized that this movie wasn’t going to be about an app or a software developer. However, that relief was negated as soon as Jen opened her mouth. This seems to be another instance of women writers that hate women. Jen is constantly negative about everything. I get that she’s supposed to lack self-confidence and is constantly doubting herself but why would she open an interior design business? This is the personality of someone who needs a boss. Not someone who can run their own successful business. It’s probably the reason their business was failing in the first place and I don’t understand why anyone would continue to be around her.
In addition to the self-misery, Jen is also mean to a lot of the people around her. While her mother, Liz (Karen Kruper), is fairly self-centered, Jen is absolutely vile to her every chance she gets. Then there is Max. Jen expects him to put his career aside just to live near his friend. She doesn’t want to be romantic with him, she just doesn’t want him to leave her. I think I might hate Jen and, no, she isn’t worth the redemption arc.
There isn’t a lot to make this movie worth watching. I enjoyed Van Hooft’s performance and Max tries his hardest to be the best character in the movie. In the end, I can’t recommend watching #Xmas. Maybe if the big redemption cycle started earlier in the movie so we could see her actually apologizing to everyone. (No, there are no apologies to be had.) But as it stands, it’s a movie about an awful woman being awful to everyone around her. I see enough of that in real life.