Seven Alternative Christmas Movies

Another year and another round of Christmas movies (Christmas with the Coopers, The Night Before, Krampus) have hit cinemas hoping to be taken to the public's heart and put in your annual rotation along with It's A Wonderful Life, Elf and Home Alone. But great Christmas movies don't have to be about Christmas, the holiday can just be humming in the background, adding an air of ennui to proceedings or giving impetus to a character looking to change his/her ways.

The films below wear their yuletide settings lightly: Christmas trees and reindeer aren't on full display, but the holiday is what gives flavour to the turmoil in their characters' lives. If you're sick of Gremlins, tired of Trading Places and done with Die Hard, these seven alternative Christmas movies could be just the thing to gently prepare you for the upcoming existential crisis that is the Christmas holidays.

2046

Dir. Wong Kar-wai

Christmas is the loneliest time of year, so it’s no surprise that Wong Kar-wai, cinema’s grand prince of loneliness, has been drawn to the season. The date acts as a beacon of melancholy in this bittersweet follow-up to In the Mood for Love. We follow the romantic lead of that earlier movie (Tony Leung) as he tries to get over the love of his life (Maggie Cheung) through a series of romantic trysts with the women who sashay into his life on various Christmas Eves.

The film flashes back and forth between Christmases past in Hong Kong and Singapore, and an imagined future of the title, where the human race travel the world on bullet trains and are advised to hug strangers for warmth. Melancholic Nat King Cole ballads fill the soundtrack, limp tinsel festoons the frame; the holiday blues have never looked more sumptuous.

Better Off Dead

Dir. Savage Steve Holland

''We've been seeing an awful lot of each other," says Beth to her slacker BF Lane (John Cusack), "and I really think it would be in my best interest if I went out with someone more popular and better looking.'' Cusack has form playing Christmas film schmucks – he does it beautifully in Christmas holiday road movie The Sure Thing and Chrimbo noir The Ice Harvest, but we’ve a soft spot for this forgotten 80s oddity.

As with most 80s teen movies, the denouement is an all-or-nothing sports event – in this case a ski race down a deathly peak called K-12 – but, such is Better Off Dead’s black humour, we’re not exactly sure if it’s meant as a way of winning the girl back or if it’s an elaborate public suicide (Lane has several other failed attempts during the movie). Aside from all the self-assisted euthanasia, a running gag about his mum’s terrible cooking (one of her concoctions literally crawls off the plate) and a malevolent paperboy looking for his Christmas tip add to the holiday cheer.

Comfort and Joy

Dir. Bill Forsyth

It’s the run-up to Christmas and cheesy disc jockey Alan “Dickey” Bird (Bill Patterson) has just been unceremoniously dumped by his kleptomaniac girlfriend, leaving him to realise his life is pretty empty without her wild charisma. And if the movies have taught us anything, it’s that Christmas is the perfect time to reassess one’s shell of an existence.

Dickey throws himself into his work and tries his hand at serious journalism, which in Bill Forsyth’s whimsical universe means he finds himself at the heart of a war over territory by Glasgow’s ice-cream van venders. Comfort and Joy is probably the least well-known of Forsyth's Scottish movies, but its low-key lyricism is the perfect antidote to the usual Christmas movie smaltz.

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Eyes Wide Shut

Dir. Stanley Kubrick

How do you like to spend the last few days leading up to Christmas? Some of you might be doing some last minute shopping. Others might have drinks with friends. Tom Cruise’s wealthy New York doctor decides to go down a rabbit hole of debauchery and sneak himself into a decadent sex orgy.

With its fairytale rhythms and night-of-redemption narrative, Kubrick’s final film is like a nightmarish reimagining of It’s a Wonderful Life. The New York city streets, a set build in London and twinkling in Christmas lights, are as phoney as the snow globe-pretty boulevards of Bedford Falls. Its final line, spoken by Nicole Kidman, isn’t as sweet as little Zuzu Bailey’s (“Every time a bell rings an angel gets his wings”), but it is just as memorable.

Go

Dir. Doug Liman

Three Christmas yarns in one here in Doug Liman’s whip-smart black comedy, which feels, with its hyperactive editing and ever-changing point-of-view, as hopped-up as its characters. The trio of stories (a checkout girl turns ecstasy dealer, a wild night in Vegas takes a turn for the worst, two cops receive a proposition they can refuse) aren’t particularly inspiring in themselves, it’s the witty way in which Liman stitches them all together that thrills.

The Christmas Eve hijinks kicks off with a hyperkinetic rave scene and the film keeps up that energy, skipping from comic scenes to menacing ones (a darkly charismatic Timothy Olyphant reminding us he should've become a massive star). There’s also a mind-reading cat, a Christmas dinner so awkward that it’s going to make your family get-together look like heaven, and a hallucinatory macarena in a supermarket. And nothing says Christmas like a drug-fueled macarena.

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Metropolitan

Dir. Whit Stillman

Here we see how New York’s wealthy Ivy League socialites – or as they call themselves, the urban haute bourgeoisie (UHB for short) – spend their time over college winter break. Our proxy into this world of white tie balls and upper east side afterparties is Tom (Edward Clements), a Princeton pauper conscripted into this exclusive club due to a severe shortage of escorts for the debutantes. In anybody else’s hands, these pretentious teens, who spend their evenings discussing Jane Austen, Charles Fourier and Lionel Trilling into the wee hours, would be obnoxious, but director Whit Stillman clearly sees their charms as well as their flaws.

The film’s standout UHB is Nick (Chris Eigeman, who would go on to steal two other Stillman pictures), whose snobbery knows no bounds and whose one-liners would make Oscar Wilde proud (“playing strip poker with an exhibitionist somehow takes the challenge away”). Every Christmas gathering should have a similar sour wit present to give it some edge. 

The Long Kiss Goodnight

Dir. Renny Harlin

Here’s one for all the unsung mothers out there. Not only does Geena Davis’s mild-mannered schoolteacher have Christmas dinner to prepare, a house to decorate and lines to learn for the upcoming village pantomime (she’s playing Mrs. Kris Kringle), she also has to dodge bullets from a gang of machine-gun-toting thugs out to murder her. During the festive season, it seems, a woman's work is never done. What makes this blistering high-concept action-comedy tick is the electric back and forth between Davis’s amnesiac housewife/assassin and Samual L Jackson as the crumpled private detective she’s hired to investigate her past.

The banter comes courtesy of Shane Black, who seems to have a Christmas fetish – almost all of his movies (Lethal Weapon; The Last Boy Scout; Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang; Iron Man 3) have Yuletide settings. Why does he insert Christmas into his scripts? “I think it’s just a universal leveler, an almost magical backdrop that invites a hush, momentary time-out in people’s lives,” Black told The Scotsman’s Alistair Harkness while promoting Iron Man 3. “And to have to dig for bits of Christmas and find that magic in the midst of the tumult [of an action film] has a real psychological resonance for me.”

This is particularly apt for The Long Kiss Goodnight, a delicious bit of wish-fulfillment, which suggest that beneath every underappreciated housewife there’s a kickass, foul-mouthed action hero.