Surviving Christmas with the Relatives

A Countryside Christmas/Surviving Christmas With The Relatives (2018) -

"Mummy! The pope mobile is here!"

The actors in this film were all very good and it was nice to see Gemma Whelan in a feminine role for a change and I mean no disrespect by that, it's just that I've only really seen her as Theon's sister in 'Game Of Thrones' (201-19) and a rough and tough lesbian in 'Queers' (2017), so it was a nice change and she made a good mum character.

I also really liked Julian Ovenden's Dad character of Dan, again I had only really come across him recently in his gay role in 'Bridgerton' (2020-). He was a pleasant father figure here and his performance in general was good.

I even enjoyed Ronni Ancona's part too. I have tended to find that she's quite extreme, but actually she was quite bearable in this one as Vicky. The character was nicely balanced.

They all faced a lot of issues that could have easily been resolved or avoided, but it would have been a very boring film without it.

And I must confess that it did start to drag towards the end where there was no suggestion that it was going to go anywhere and it didn't really, but it was still enjoyable, because it felt real for the most part, like a Christmas that I could recognise from a British home, because it wasn't all cookie baking and tree decorating and snowmen building contests, like the offerings from Hallmark and so on.

And that was the main gist of the film, a standard holiday with the kids at home, interrupted by the visiting relatives and no matter how much prep had been done, there still hadn't been enough time to do everything necessary. I start my next year's Christmas shopping as soon as I'm done each December, but I never seem to get everything else sorted in time, so I recognised the pressure.

It did smack of a typical Richard Curtis type of film in a lot of ways, because it was about a family that didn't really have any money troubles, but they thought that they were. That was no council flat or bedsit they were living in. They were also much more of a film family than a typical British dynamic in most realities.

It had some fairly good production values and nobody in the cast gave a duff performance, but there was room for improvement. It still felt sweet in some ways and had a great feeling of the season too.

721.56/1000.

Not bad for a tv Christmas movie. A little grittier than most and though it's not something to watch over and over, it kept me watching to see what would happen to these characters. As others have commented, not everyone is like able, but that's how it is in a family. I prefer a more realistic story than overly nice (unreal) Christmas stories.

Some of the actors were good. But it was like different characters playing individual roles that never quite became an ensemble. There were so many individual plots that nothing was interesting. Truly nothing was interesting about this film.

I seemed to spend most of it shouting at Gemma Whelan (who I love & why I watched this) to get dressed! She spends a lot in time in a tiny shortie nightie, wellies & thick coat, at one time complaining that the (non existent) frost had got her sprouts! If it was that cold - and cold enough for her husband to wear a woolly hat in bed - she'd be wearing nice warm pyjamas. Don't know why that bugged me, but it did!

I felt that some parts of the story were unresolved - something would happen either without explaining why or how, or it wouldn't be discussed again. And then everything suddenly became all right again.

Based on some other reviews I guess it might have been edited for TV.

Interesting if you want a glimpse into 3 days in the lives of a dysfunctional family, but not if you want a "traditional" nice & tidy Hallmark-type Christmas movie.

The first few minutes says it all. Absolute tosh from the start and only gets worse. Don't waste your time!