102 min | PG-13 | November 25, 2020 | Hulu
Abby plans to propose to her girlfriend over Christmas. Then she learns Harper never came out to her conservative family. The holiday gets longer.
Abby agrees to spend Christmas with Harper’s picture-perfect family. She does not know that Harper has hidden their relationship and reintroduces her as the orphaned straight roommate. The film puts a closeted woman in her childhood home and watches her shrink back into the role her parents expect. This is not really a story about coming out. It is a story about what a person will sacrifice, and who they will sacrifice, to stay loved by people who do not know them.
Kristen Stewart plays Abby as a woman performing patience while her dignity erodes by the hour. She does the comedy of the hidden girlfriend and the deeper work of someone realizing she has agreed to disappear. Mackenzie Davis plays Harper as charming in public and cruel in the gaps, and Davis lets the cruelty read as fear rather than malice. Dan Levy plays John, Abby’s friend, and turns every phone call into the film’s clearest voice of reason. Aubrey Plaza plays Riley, Harper’s ex, with a calm that exposes how much Abby is settling for. Plaza and Stewart share the scenes where the movie finally breathes.
Clea DuVall directs and co-writes the script with Mary Holland, who also plays the overlooked sister Jane. DuVall stages the Caldwell house as a campaign headquarters, all symmetrical rooms and framed family portraits, and shoots it in bright holiday warmth that curdles into surveillance. The blocking keeps Abby on the edges of every group, half a step behind Harper, physically pushed out of the frame she was promised a place in. The production design sells the family as a brand. The visual control is the film’s strongest idea, even when the screenplay retreats into rom-com mechanics.
The problem is the central romance. The script asks the audience to want Harper and Abby to end up together while showing exactly why they should not. Harper’s treatment of Abby is the most honest thing in the movie, and the formula requires the film to forgive it faster than it earns. DuVall finds real pain in the supporting players and real comedy in Levy and Plaza, then routes everything back to a couple the film has spent its whole running argument undermining. It is a sharp idea wearing a conventional bow.