Crooked Marquee’s New Christmas Canon: Silent Night

This week, we’ll be focusing our posts on holiday movies, including several that we feel are worth putting into your holiday viewing rotation this year. Follow along here.

No matter how much Christmas is considered the happiest of all days, the Disneyworld of holidays upon which nothing bad could possibly happen, it’s always tinged with a little bit of sadness, a healthy portion of indefinable melancholy. The best Christmas movies take advantage of the ever-so-slightly bitter quality that cuts the otherwise saccharine nature of the holiday, and Silent Night, an underseen tragicomedy from 2021, takes this to its logical extreme. It is a film that fully capitalizes on the natural contrasts of the holiday season: the juxtaposition of rebirth and the finality of death; childhood joy and the loss of innocence.

Silent Night begins with the most traditional of Christmas plots: A married couple (Kiera Knightley and Matthew Goode) and their children invite friends of the family to celebrate the holidays together at a cozy English estate, bringing big personalities into conflict with one another as old grievances come alive. But there’s an underlying tension that goes well beyond normal dysfunctional relationships, something massive and unpleasant that lingers just beneath the surface. We learn eventually that this is no ordinary Christmas celebration: It’s to be their last holiday ever. There is a poisonous gas cloud that will eventually blanket the entire Earth, the result of environmental damage that will bring about an end to the human race. The British government, keenly aware of the agony caused by interaction with the poison cloud, has issued its populace with suicide pills, hoping to save them the pain of a natural death. So that’s what this party is for: They’ll drink eggnog together, open presents together, and die together. Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

Writer/director Camille Griffin blends pitch black comedy and genuine pathos, but that’s far from her film’s only intentional contradiction. It contrasts the joyfulness of Christmas spent with family and friends with the pain of knowing that they’ll all be dead by New Year’s Day. Christmas itself is an opportunity to look back, turning over memories in your mind with a nostalgic glow, but also carries with it the promise of the future, a whole new year ahead of us that serves as a blank slate with seemingly limitless possibilities. Except this Christmas, of course, where the lack of any kind of future could not be more glaringly obvious. The presence of the children gives this an added emotional resonance, their lives about to be snuffed out before they’d actually begun.

Part of the reason why Christmas is always a little bit sad is because we’re no longer children; no matter what we do, no matter how hard we try, we can’t ever experience the holiday the way we did when we were eight years old. Silent Night captures this feeling too, the wide-eyed joy of childhood met with the crushing horror of reality. At first the children are kept in the dark. They know things aren’t quite normal, they pick up on the general atmosphere in the way that children always do, but they can’t quite grasp the enormity and permanence of what faces them. But this can’t last forever. Art (Roman Griffin Davies) flees the house, refusing to take the pill and clinging to the hope that the entire scientific community is wrong, that people could survive the clouds if only they were willing to try. Once on the road, though, he discovers a car filled with the dead bodies of a family, and reality comes crashing in on him. His loss of innocence is complete.

The anger that the older children feel once they learn the truth, a clear sense of betrayal at the fact that their parents allowed this to happen to them, strikes a chord. Younger generations, who will watch the seas rise and inherit a planet significantly less habitable than the one they were born into, are reflected in this existential rage. Silent Night is not necessarily a film about climate change, nor is it particularly interested in belaboring that point, but the underlying emotions of its narrative context are impossible to ignore.

Silent Night doesn’t quite fall in line with the holiday films that envelop their audiences in a warm hug of Christmas cheer (to say the least), nor does it give into the perversions of holiday horror like, for example, Silent Night, Deadly Night or Black Christmas. Instead, it makes its mark by cultivating a pervasive sense of despair, relentless in its willingness to leave its viewers carved hollow, even as it offers a kernel of hope at the very end. This is, perhaps, why it struggled to find a wider audience, but it’s this very quality that has made it such a unique and impactful addition to the Christmas canon.