"Silent Night" a bleakly funny, inevitably tragic Christmas miracle

Silent Night (2021)

Movies set on or around Christmas can either be as cozy as a cup of cocoa, or they can upend our expectations and be as dark as coal. Writer-director Camille Griffin has it both ways—and effectively manages her ensemble of a dozen actors—for her feature debut, “Silent Night,” a very British black comedy full of familial dysfunction and global impending doom, all on Christmas! Just imagine "The Big Chill" set on December 25th where the next day is already lined up to the funeral for every old college friend and their families. That might be too heavy of a proposition for some viewers because, even though the film was conceived and shot before the pandemic, there is a certain melancholy that feels prescient and relevant more now than ever. Whether or not it's subjectively a too-soon situation, "Silent Night" is bleakly funny and tragically harrowing with droll, prickly wit as a chaser before becoming the feel-bad film of 2021 in a good way.

In “Silent Night,” it's a holly jolly Christmas, even while a poisonous gas spreading across the globe is headed for London. The government has put together one solution: a suicide pill. Before our characters make their decision at midnight, they might as well make the best of their final night, right? Nell (Keira Knightley) and Simon (Matthew Goode) welcome their closest college friends to their English countryside home for a holiday feast and a night of love and forgiveness. Their sons, Art (Roman Griffin Davis) and twin boys Hardy (Hardy Griffin Davis) and Thomas (Gilby Griffin Davis), are all sorts of rambunctious. Nell’s best friend, the stuffy and cruelly insecure Sandra (Annabelle Wallis), arrives first with her boring husband Tony (Rufus Jones), and their annoying daddy’s-girl daughter Kitty (Davida McKenzie), who demands sticky toffee pudding. Then there’s the outspoken Bella (Lucy Punch) and her partner Alex (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), who's trying to stay sober, and lastly, cancer doctor James (Sopé Dìrísù) and his younger girlfriend Sophie (Lily-Rose Depp), who’s newly pregnant. It’s the end of the world as they know it, and this will, in fact, be everyone’s last Christmas.

1999’s “Last Night,” 2011’s “Melancholia,” and 2012’s “Seeking a Friend at the End of the World” would make appropriate “if you liked this…” recommendations in the case of "Silent Night." What begins as a breezy, lightly salty Christmas dramedy, cued to Michael Bublé’s cheerful “The Christmas Sweater" from a car radio, slowly darkens. A child cutting himself while chopping carrots—and the blood just remaining on the carrots—is the first sign that something is off and not so ordinary. Once all of the characters are assembled under one roof—and a couple of the men are sent into town to break into a store (!) for the forgotten dessert—there is enough leisure time spent with the party hosts and their friends and family before everything ends. It’s reasonable to assume that these people find nothing productive in worrying about what is happening when celebrating the final hours of their lives with the ones they love is probably the best option. Past resentments will surely bubble to the twinkly-light surface, too.

In melding two kinds of movies, Camille Griffin does strike the right tonal balance between jovial and downbeat with aplomb. Admirably never getting into the weeds of this apocalyptic setting, Griffin is more interested in establishing all of the characters and following them until the end. She does so rather efficiently, and the actors go a few steps more in making them feel well-drawn and making their histories with each other understandable. Led by a reliably charming Keira Knightley, the cast is uniformly great, with special mention going to Lucy Punch's hilariously spiky and then heartbreaking work, Annabelle Wallis bringing surprising depth to her vain Sandra, and Lily-Rose Depth showing maternal warmth as the pregnant Sophie. There’s also a true sense of family between these friends and their families, which makes all the more sense that Griffin has given roles to her real-life sons, Roman Griffin Davis (who played the title character in “Jojo Rabbit”) and twins Hardy Griffin Davis and Gilby Griffin Davis. With the most to do of the three, Roman is excellent as the foul-mouthed Art. 

“I’ve seen ‘The Road.’ I can’t do post-apocalyptic monochrome,” acknowledges a character as their time on Earth gets shorter and shorter. It’s a funny line, but also grim, devastating, and perfectly inevitable. More sobering and profoundly sad is one particular moment where Nell and her family FaceTime with her mum, minutes before the poisonous gas floods in, and no opportunity for gallows humor is left untouched, like when Simon fetches his entire family four Coca Colas to down their suicide pills but their last beverages aren’t cold. Where “Silent Night” poignantly ends is existentially dread-inducing and committed to the nihilistic bit, with one final surprise that makes the insinuation even more lonesome and fatalistic. It never forgets to amuse, even if the conclusion is much less jolly than the film's first half. There’s no judgment if audiences want to put on something purely charming and rosy like “Love Actually” or “The Holiday” afterward, but "Silent Night" is an end-of-the-year miracle of a genre mash-up.

Grade: A -

RLJE Films is releasing “Silent Night” (92 min.) in select theaters and on AMC+ on December 3, 2021.