En underbar jävla jul

I think our two reviewers are a bit harsh. Yes, the film portrays some stereotypical attitudes. Yes, Ulf, is seemingly that stereotypical homophobic character. But, Ulf does have a point, as seen through the prism of his conservative upbringing and his legalistic training.

The performance of Maria Lundqvist is outstanding. Coming from Australia, and not Au fait with Scandinavian cinema and actors, I thought hers as Monica was superb.

Yes, it did get a bit schmaltzy, but, hey, this is Xmas time: how many Hollywood films cover this territory? It is a Universal sentiment, and, if it is encompassing of the "gay" community. why not? I did shed a tear. And in my book, any film that makes a 66 year old cry, has something going for it!!!!

A good test of a "comedic" film is the laughter engendered in an audience. I have endured too many supposed comedies, where I have continually thought, "This isn't at all funny." I saw this film at a festival showing with about 900 people in the audience. Although the laughter was not constant, there were many, many occasions during the film, when one could not hear the lines of the actors, because there was such prolonged uproarious laughter in response to the preceding dialogue. I personally haven't laughed so much at film in a very long time.

It is a very charming Christmas story, featuring a very unusual (to an American) Christmas celebration involving extended families of two young gay men meeting for the first time. The acting is of the highest caliber. There are some pratfalls, but if they are humorous, it is not because someone slipped on a banana peel, but the circumstances leading up to the slip. Most of the humor is from the lines of the actors. Although the ending is predictable and perhaps formulaic, no audience would expect it to end a tragically, and comedy continues to the end.

This movie is absolutely horrendous. From a critic point of view I'd say the movie belongs between an IMDb rating of 4 - 5, but the fact that it has such a rating as 6.3(as I'm writing this), I felt the need to over exaggerate on my score in order to lower its overall rating, because this really isn't a movie that you'd want to stumble across by accident.

To start it all of, I would say the major flaw of this movie comes down to its script and story development.

It's said to be a comedy, although that's among what it lacks the most. Overall it doesn't bring anything new or interesting, and on top of that, it has some serious "cringy"(as the teens call it) moments, in fact all to many. Its so called "humor" for the most part consists of someone making a clumsy entrance, saying something awkward about someone while they're sitting next to him or her, or just making it as simple as strictly riping off ideas that has worked in the past from other better movies. Before I watched it I had my expectations set to a standard B-movie, unfortunately for me that wasn't the case. There were multiple occasions where the movie just tried so hard to make it funny, that you couldn't but smile at how they thought people would laugh at someone stumble over an object and crashing a lamp. In other words I wouldn't recommend this movie, it has its clutch moments and occasionally good scenes, but simply doesn't make it to be even a B-tier movie.

To summarise briefly I'll give some key-words; Cringe, forced, uninteresting, abysmal.

I'm a christian and a big fan of Christmas so in November and December I watch a lot of Christmas movies. There aren't many Swedish Christmas movies except for Sagan om Karl-Bertil Jonssons julafton and Tomten är far till alla barnen (also known as In Bed With Santa), the last one being one of my favorites. When I heard of En underbar jävla jul I thought "Finally! Another Swedish Christmas movie! That was about time!" But after watching it, I got very disappointed! There is no Christmas spirit whatsoever in this movie, there's not even any humor. It's seems to me, the only purpose with En underbar jävla jul was to make a movie as politically correct as possible. I hate politically correctness and this is movie isn't even close to depicting the Swedish Christmas celebration.

The Swedish film En underbar jävla jul was shown in the U.S. with the title Holy Mess (2015). (If you go to Google Translate, you'll learn that the original Swedish title is quite a bit more colorful. "Jul" in this context means "Yule.") The movie was co-written and directed by Helena Bergström. Bergström also plays a supporting role.

This is an ensemble film, in which a dozen people gather together at the home of a gay couple for Christmas Eve. Once you know that, you can pretty much predict the plot-- homophobic parents, an aging grandmother, a surrogate mother, etc.

In a movie like this, success or failure depends on the quality of the acting. These actors are very talented and capable. In fact, they are so good that I won't try to single out any of them for special praise. Not only is each actor competent, but they play well in ensemble.

This film has a terrible 5.8 IMDb rating. It's not a great film, but it's much better than that.

We saw this movie at the excellent Little Theatre, as part of the wonderful ImageOut Rochester LGBT Film Festival. It will also work well on the small screen.

A Holy Mess is one of 22 films that had their New York State premiere, or their East Coast premiere, at ImageOut. My compliments to the ImageOut Programming Committee for their great success in bringing these films to Rochester.