Sex Education star Asa Butterfield continues to stretch his comedy muscles, joined by theatre actor Cora Kirk, in the Amazon Prime Video holiday film Your Christmas or Mine. The film follows a young couple on Christmas break, when they each decide to surprise the other by going to their respective opposite homes — meaning they wind up at each other's homes, alone.
Hayley (Kirk) heads to a virtually empty mansion in Gloucestershire where it is not even obvious Christmas is happening, while James (Butterfield) winds up at a packed semi-detached house in Macclesfield. When a sudden snowfall leaves them stranded apart, each learns more about the other than they bargained for.
Like every romcom, the question at the heart of the story is will their love survive this conflict? Your Christmas or Mine makes it feel like a foregone conclusion that they will, at least until the credits roll — after all, young love is fickle.
There are a few necessary film contrivances that have to happen in order for the plot of Your Christmas or Mine to happen, and some of them are slightly beyond belief. As with any film, it's up to the individual viewer to decide what amount of disbelief they can suspend to envelope themselves in the film.
What helps Your Christmas or Mine over the line is its extended cast, who perform their roles with dedication that almost outpaces the movie itself. Alex Jennings (The Crown, amongst others) as an emotionless, wealthy widower is just on the right side of insufferable. Likewise, Line of Duty's Daniel Mays plays an eccentric and slightly ditzy dad with charm.
The rest of the cast is a comforting rotation of familiar faces: Coronation Street star Natalie Gumede, Succession's Harriet Walter, Game of Thrones actor David Bradley, Angela Griffin (Waterloo Road), and Lucien Laviscount (Emily in Paris) also appear, giving each character as much realness as they possibly can, despite the forced hijinks that ensue.
The slow unraveling of family secrets, both kept from the protagonists themselves and each other keeps the plot moving at a clip, but there isn't much time to sit and linger with their ramifications.
In a way this is probably for the best, because if we did have time the cracks might begin to show: the drama feels slightly manufactured and the emotional backbone of the movie, though earnestly delivered, falls slightly flat.
Fans of Butterfield will likely find plenty to enjoy, and fans of the Christmas romcom will likely forgive the more egregious nonsense. But those who have a keener eye for the holiday-time romance might feel there's just too many twists and not a strong enough narrative backbone upon which to hang them.
Still, the movie reflects a more accurate London and is a bit of a break from the other contrived plots of holiday romcoms (there's no princess doppelgänger or bouts of amnesia). Your Christmas or Mine may not have the longevity ofThe Holiday or Love Actually, but it definitely fills a missing niche — a younger-skewed film that still takes its characters and their internal lives seriously.
Your Christmas or Mine streams on Prime Video from December 2.
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