Let It Snow

LET IT SNOW - NETLFIX

One of the most pleasant surprises in Netflix’s dishearteningly bad Christmas movie stocking this year is Let It Snow, a simple film which mostly manages to navigate tired clichés immortalised by the streaming service itself.

The plot is thin but here, a lacking narrative serves the film wonderfully, starting the ball rolling from the outset with a simple snowstorm. This sets in motion interesting events which, by the end, snowball into multiple tangibly emotive strands. The cast is also pleasant, with some Netflix stalwarts like Kiernan Shipka from hit The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and the criminally underrated Liv Hewson of Santa Clarita Diet fame, whose lesbian character provides welcome variety to a film genre which is particularly cowardly when it comes to attempting to appeal to anyone outside of the general viewing populace.

Narratively, the editing moves between different groups of characters, almost in rotation, so the viewer never has to wait too long to find what happens to each person. It's a welcome change — like a cool blast of frosty air — to the established formula consisting of a tiny number of main characters carrying almost the entire narrative weight of the film, aided only with a handful of underwritten side characters. This structure could feel too intrusive, as though no characters have room to breathe, but by giving each character a well-defined arc of emotions, it only occasionally dabbles into invasiveness and never into a feeling of bona-fide, passive voyeurism. It gives the film a sense of scope — something many seasonal Netflix movies lack sorely. This, in turn, gives the film ambition, refreshing compared to the remainder of the near-panoptically corporate slate of Christmas films. Instead of settling with laziness by using the well-worn excuse of only trying to live up to a bar lowering seemingly exponentially year on year, it not only adds more than a couple of characters but develops them quite well too. This may seem like a low bar in and of itself but it puts it streets ahead of comparative offerings.

It isn't all sunshine and rainbows, though, and not only because the town seems stuck in a perpetual state of midwinter. Where the film finds itself out of ideas, and never inescapably so, it often delves into derivation. Waffle Town, evidently the sole business in the entirety of the town wherein the film is set — which is disappointingly not eponymously named with the waffle-providing business, a squandered opportunity — serves only one function: a sort of funnel to collate the characters into. It's especially prevalent in the third act, although this mechanic is noticeable throughout. As such, it has practically the same reason for existing as Pop's Diner from Riverdale and it's hard to imagine that the writers didn't simply copy one of that show's less enamouring features and paste it here, less adapting ideas than ripping them off. In lieu of doing this, the script simply abandons ideas. Most notably, it introduces the whole character of a 'tin foil woman', played by Joan Cusack, who inexplicably covers many of her possessions with the silver, shiny substance of her name.

Does this woman have an obsessive need to ensure her body temperature is kept as constant as possible? Is it an excessively persistent allegory for conspiracy theorists or is the tin foil woman simply a fashion designer? The film never explains this or even hints at it, which is more irritating than cutesy, doubly so considering the character spends almost all of her time ferrying around characters and having very little impact elsewhere apart from conveniently moving people from place to place. Cusack is good but the entire character feels redundant.

Let It Snow will likely not be remembered by many viewers weeks, or even days, after watching. It will disappear into the Netflix algorithms, being perennially replaced with newer films, like fresh, icy sheets falling onto the melting snow beneath, but it can at least be satisfied knowing it is like a patch of white snow — a bastion of integrity — amid a sea of yellow.

Let It Snow is streaming exclusively on NETFLIX November 8th.