Over the holiday season I’m sharing streaming recommendations for movies for when you want to feel festive but not necessarily Christmassy, and also for Christmas movies that you may not have heard of before. Today: one of the latter.
And as my holiday gift to you, if you become a paying Substack subscriber by December 31st, you’ll get 50% off your first year.
It’s a classic English-house-party dramedy, a melancholy satire about manners and mores, except this one is happening at the end of the world. On Christmas Day, as the end is nigh and the whole world knows it, a close-knit group of former university friends, hosted by Keira Knightley and Matthew Goode, gather for one last blowout.
In 2021, when Silent Night was released, this bleak, bone-dry-funny movie felt like a terrifying slap in the face that we had well earned: we were two years into a global pandemic that we could have then already quashed but didn’t. Two further years on, with new viral variants popping up all over, the slap stings harder. Worse, the particular apocalypse here is — no spoiler — a sci-fi spinoff of global warming, and that nightmare, which we could have started confronting decades ago, took a more vicious bite in 2023 than it did even only two years.
The overarching horror of the brutal and excoriating Silent Night is that, unlike many similar end-of-the-world movies, with their killer asteroids and the like, its apocalypse is inescapably our fault. This is a Christmas movie that inverts the traditional vibe of the season: the hope is nil and the chance of a fresh start in a new year nonexistent.
US: stream on AMC+ (via Prime and Apple TV); rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV
UK: stream on Prime; rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV
See Silent Night at Letterboxd for more viewing options.
