‘Joy to the World’ (2025) Review – Early Christmas Movie Brings Bad Luck

A Christmas movie releasing on the first day of November is really pushing it. It’s the film equivalent of those people who put their trees up as soon as the leaves start changing colour. It’s almost an assault on good taste and decency, frankly, which applies to a lot of Joy to the World overall. It’s one of those movies that is so unambitious and uninteresting that you want to be annoyed by it wasting your time, but you can’t quite bring yourself to hate it because there is a bit of charm between the leads, and it is a little heart-warming if you meet it halfway. I mostly feel the same way about it as I do about socks as a gift. They’ll keep your feet warm, but you’ll definitely wish you were getting something better.

And to think that I was only just moaning about influencers. To be fair, Joy Edwards (Emmanuelle Chriqui) isn’t an influencer in the hip modern sense, but in the “special guest on daytime TV” sense. It’s a classier version, from back when self-styled lifestyle gurus had to actually earn their stripes by writing books and cooking cute recipes passed down from their grandmothers and such. But Joy is influencer-esque in one key sense – everything she presents to the world is carefully managed fiction, and her entire life is, essentially, a lie.

Blame the book deals. Joy’s famous primarily for a string of cosy lifestyle tomes in a series called – you guessed it – Joy to the World, and the professional obligations of selling enormous numbers of these volumes have essentially trapped Joy in an endless cosplay routine. As far as the world’s concerned, she’s a supremely stylish and classy interior design and cookery specialist who lives in a gorgeous house decorated like something from the front of a Christmas card. In reality, she drinks a lot of wine and sleeps on the couch most nights.

Thanks to her busybody agent, Joy is roped into inviting a cooking channel camera crew into her performatively plush house, Goose Lane, to film her quintessentially loving family enjoying a Christmas dinner. The only problem is that she doesn’t have a family, and the real Goose Lane doesn’t have any of the chickens and fresh produce that her books claim it does. To keep up the illusion, some improvisation is necessary. For that, Joy pushes her “best friend”, Max (Chad Michael Murray), to pose as her husband, her housekeeper and postman to play her parents, and a couple of local siblings to double as their kids.

From that description alone, I can virtually guarantee you know exactly where Joy to the World is going. And that’s where it goes, in precisely the manner you’d expect. The kids, who feel neglected by their own workaholic parents, fit right in. There’s a flush of kindly connection between the “grandparents”. And, of course, Joy and Max quickly realise that in the midst of all this fakery, something very real is blossoming between them.

It’s not a terrible way of pointing an accusatory finger at the performatively glamorous lifestyles of people whose job is to sell an idea. Everyone can probably stand to be reminded that what you see online and on TV is almost never reflective of reality, and that the people who pretend to be the happiest are, often, the most depressed and lonely, which is typically quite a reassuring thought if you’re feeling bad about your own circumstances. But the movie’s also about how Christmas isn’t about the size of your turkey or the freshness of your produce or the cost of your gifts; it’s about family, both the real kind and the neighborhood strangers you pick up along the way.

Nobody’s buying it in this case, though, since the most fundamental building blocks of Joy to the World don’t really work. The core romance hinges on the idea that Joy and Max are “just friends” – when we meet him, he’s living in her guest house under false pretences and posing as her chauffeur – but they never for a moment feel like friends. The script’s going for something akin to Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen in Apple TV+’s Platonic, but Chriqui and Michael Murray are both far too good-looking to be believable as lonely singletons, and they have nothing but romantic chemistry from the very first moment. It’s also deeply implausible that Joy’s ruse would have stood up this long, let alone survive intense scrutiny, so nothing that happens in the predictable third act really resonates.

You can feel, at times, the screenplay introducing elements that you just know will slot neatly into place down the line, and while there’s sometimes some comfort to be found in that kind of familiar storytelling, it’s so explicitly manufactured here that you can’t buy in. It’s a shame, because there are seasonally appropriate underlying values here, and I like the leads a lot, but it’s a stocking filler rather than a proper gift.