Hotel for the Holidays

Is it fair to assess a Christmas romcom like any other film? After all, their very appeal lies in the exaggerated sentimentality, predictability and an utter abandonment of reality – elements that would usually detract from the enjoyment of a movie any other time of the year. In her short story Sweet Virginia, entertainment reporter-turned-author of the beloved You series Caroline Kepnes comes to the defence of the greeting card-originating film format and the escapism the indulgence can provide to its predominantly female viewership.

But even in this niche of guilty pleasures, productions like Love Actually, The Holiday, or more recently, Happiest Season prove that among all the desired cheesiness, there can still be substance. The first Amazon Freevee Original project Hotel for the Holidays, however, opted for a different route.

Set in a New York City hotel that is simultaneously high-end enough for former royalty and celebrities to stay there, but so dilapidated its manager wants to leave as soon as possible, the feature follows a number of characters in the days leading up to Christmas. At the centre is the young managing director Georgia (Madelaine Petsch), who desperately tries to pitch her idea of an Auberge Moderne to the hotel owner, and whose most compelling argument to a potential financier is that “during the holiday season, an average of 800,000 people pass through Rockefeller Center every day – all of those people need somewhere to stay.” But of course, whatever it is any of the hotel staff or guests are in search of, finding a romantic partner is what truly counts at the end of the day.

Director Ron Oliver also wrote the screenplay for Netflix’s current representative of the genre (Falling for Christmas), and dozens more like it. True to festive tradition, these projects are empty calories originating from the exact same cookie cutter. Character’s names might change, occasionally the actors do (even though especially Canadian actors like Jessica Lowndes and Luke Macfarlane seem to have based their careers around them), but there is so little characterisation to any of the players, an AI could regenerate the scripts and an audience would be none the wiser.

Hotel for the Holidays doesn’t even bother with an attempt to introduce personalities: members of the hotel staff simply wear their job titles instead of name tags – how could a viewer be expected to make the connection that someone changing the light bulbs in a room could be working for maintenance? – but even those become interchangeable, with complete disregard for how the hotel industry actually functions. Further playing the audience for fools, one is supposed to believe that a famous singer-slash-internet sensation immediately becomes unrecognisable to those around her, when she takes out her bright pink hair extensions.

There are no discernible performances to speak of, as the maximum material the actors are given to work with is the pathos in the pauses between their next lines.

The images are bright and glossy, the predominantly wide depth of field betraying that there are no real focal points to rivet on. Another problem herein lies that it becomes very obvious that the same extras are being recycled in different scenes, which further diminishes whatever credibility the set-up could possibly have achieved.

With the constant re-iterated exposition in its dialogue, one is given the impression that this film was perhaps made to enable the ever-shortening attention span of audiences who can’t look away from their smartphones for the duration of its 84-minute runtime, and as such will be gracefully forgiving for not being captivated by it.

With its abundance of shortcomings, Hotel for the Holidays will amount to the perfect “guilty pleasure” that people may crave as they cuddle up with a blanket and hot chocolate to turn off the outside world.

Selina Sondermann

Hotel for the Holidays is released on 2^nd December 2022.

Watch the trailer for Hotel for the Holidays here: