What would Christmas be without bland festive fare? Netflix is kicking off the 2025 holiday season with the usual dross, following the usual formula, which is a bit more charmless than usual since Hulu already beat them to it with the similarly rubbish Joy to the World. But the good news is that A Merry Little Ex-Mas is a better movie than that one, even if it barely aspires to much more than the streamer’s other mechanical seasonal efforts like Falling for Christmas and Meet Me Next Christmas.
Following the trend of these things featuring fallen stars of yesteryear, the movie is headlined by – wait for it – Alicia Silverstone, who has aged like fine wine in the three decades since she starred in Clueless, and Oliver Hudson, the Dawson’s Creek alum who has also remained something of a dish. You can totally buy these two being a married couple, which is a bit problematic since they’re due to get divorced. Kate (Silverstone) and Everett (Hudson) have drifted apart over the years, thanks to a poor work-life balance (on his part) and a sense of dreams unfulfilled (on hers), but they’ve decided to be mature about things to provide their college-age children one last family Christmas before the divorce.
I should note that A Merry Little Ex-Mas is set in a town called Winterlight. Winterlight! I was fully expecting to meet a kindly older character named Snowy McWhitebeard, but while things don’t get quite that obvious, the small-town shaken-snowglobe setting not only gives away the movie’s entire vibe but also highlights its budgetary constraints. My suspicion is that most of the money was spent on a needlessly flowery animated opening that provides some context for Kate and Everett’s marriage and the breakdown thereof, which seems a bit pointless since the script – penned by Holly Hester – makes every detail of it painfully clear regardless.
The problem that quickly emerges with Kate and Everett’s divorce is that neither of them wants it. He has made it as a local doctor and is already learning to take more time away from the office, and she thinks she’s being restricted by a small town that she’s clearly in love with and has no intention of ever leaving. The issues are clearly easy to resolve way before they’re ultimately easily resolved; this is all I could think about every time a quasi-romantic moment occurred that easily sidestepped something that was framed as an insurmountable problem in their marriage.
I should mention that these “problems” – and indeed their solutions – are brought into starker relief by the unexpected presence of Everett’s new girlfriend, Tess (Jameela Jamil), a super-successful big-city knockout who isn’t as openly villainous as I expected her to be but can nonetheless detect immediately that her new man is blatantly still in love with his soon-to-be-ex-wife. In response, Kate starts “dating” the much younger Chet (Pierson Fode), a bundle of charming himbo energy who at one point accidentally sets a Christmas tree on fire and tries to put it out by stripping to his underwear and whipping it.
From the above, you know everything that’s going to happen in A Merry Little Ex-Mas and, indeed, the precise manner in which it will occur. The predictability of the Hallmark template – which has been co-opted by Netflix into a more cynical version – is reassuring for many, and I have no doubt whatsoever that the perfectly adequate cast here will please a good number of people who turn up looking for precisely the type of movie this is. But one has to wonder when the comfort of a festive movie exactly like every other festive movie ceases to be comforting and instead becomes a kind of Sisyphean prison of futility, a reminder of your own unchanging life and unfulfilled dreams.
Merry Christmas, everyone.