Silent Night begins like dozens of other Christmas movies, with a family's frenzied preparations for the holiday and visitors on their way. At a posh English country estate, Nell (Keira Knightley) rushes around the house, preparing food and wrangling her children, while her husband Simon (Matthew Goode) chases chickens in the yard. On the road to the house, three couples banter and bicker about joining Nell and her family for the holiday.
Haughty Sandra (Annabelle Wallis) and her dull husband Tony (Rufus Jones), both old boarding school friends of Nell and Simon, bring their bratty daughter Kitty (Davida McKenzie). Their fellow former classmates Bella (Lucy Punch) and James (Sope Dirisu) are accompanied by their reluctant significant others. Bella's girlfriend Alex (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) and James' American girlfriend Sophie (Lily-Rose Depp) provide grounded contrasts to the upper-class entitlement of the close-knit friend group.
Silent Night's early scenes play like a typical Christmas comedy, albeit one with a slightly darker edge: friends trade insults, and Nell and Simon's children are alarmingly free with their use of profanity. Writer-director Camille Griffin conveys a vague sense of unease, but that could just be typical holiday tension. Even when the kids start arguing about some kind of national emergency, it's not quite clear how dire the situation really is. Griffin makes sure to establish her characters as obnoxious and unlikable before she reveals the true extent of their circumstances, and that puts the movie at a disadvantage when it takes a hard turn toward the bleak and depressing.
The children aren't just arguing about the established effects of climate change or geopolitical tensions, but about an extinction-level disaster that's engulfing the planet. Possibly as a result of human-caused environmental damage, a toxic cloud has been released from the Earth and is in the process of wiping out all of human life. It's predicted to arrive in England on the day after Christmas, but the British government has helpfully provided all citizens with an "exit pill," so that people can end their lives before experiencing the horrific pain caused by toxic-cloud death.
It's tough to make something like that funny, especially when children are involved. To her credit, Griffin doesn't try to. Once she's revealed what's really happening, fairly early on in the movie, she doesn't shy away from the terror and desperation that the characters are feeling. Silent Night becomes something closer to Lars von Trier's Melancholia than Love, Actually. There's a long tradition of Christmas horror movies, but Silent Night has very little in common with movies like Black Christmas or the similarly titled Silent Night, Deadly Night. Its setting and basic premise recall the underrated 2008 British Christmas horror movie The Children, but even that movie eventually embraced traditional suspense and slasher-movie elements.
There isn't really any suspense to Silent Night, since the characters all treat the impending end of humanity as an inevitability. Sophie quietly protests against the idea of the exit pill. Nell and Simon's son Art (Jojo Rabbit's Roman Griffin Davis) protests much more loudly, using his newfound license to swear to rail against his parents for literally consigning him to death. There's some bitter humor to the scene in which the adults try to assure their children that this disaster is not their fault -- which of course is true in that these particular people aren't responsible for all environmental destruction, but is also an example of the kind of buck-passing that has placed humanity in this horrible position.
That scene is pretty much the extent of Silent Night's commentary on environmentalism, though. Griffin is more focused on her characters' petty jealousies and crippling depression than on making any larger social points. That would be fine if Silent Night's characters were more enjoyable to spend time with, but despite a talented cast, these characters remain insufferable even as they start to face reality. It's tough not to admire Silent Night's boldness. Griffin never backs away from her massive downer of a premise. She also casts her own children as Art and his two brothers, making for a grim family project as they're subjected to some truly harsh scenarios. At one point, a character likens their situation to The Road, and that's not an unreasonable comparison.
Meanwhile, it's still Christmas, and Griffin continues to include the trappings of Christmas movies, including Christmas songs, gift-giving, decorations, and phone calls with loved ones, all with a morbid sense of duty. As committed as Silent Night is to its unpleasant concept, it's still a mess of jarring tonal shifts and shrill characters. The humor loses its effectiveness as the movie goes on, going from dark to merely misplaced, failing to wring laughs from the apocalypse as in movies like Shaun of the Dead or indie comedy It's a Disaster. Silent Night is unlike any other Christmas movie out there, but its audacity ultimately doesn't pay off.
Silent Night opens Friday, Dec. 3 in select theaters and streaming on AMC+.