If Christmas is a time of joy and togetherness, it is also often marked by loneliness, regret and fear for the future. It is that side of the season that is explored in So This Is Christmas (RTÉ One, Wednesday), a beautifully made, if often bleak and occasionally downright dismal, portrayal of small-town Ireland in the cruel midwinter.
Shooting mainly in Gort, Co Galway, Portarlington in Laois and their hinterlands in late 2022, director Ken Wardrop introduces us to a cast of about half a dozen, each of whom finds Christmas a struggle. There is Jason and his two sons, preparing for the first Christmas without their wife and mother. “Roxy was my wife and soul mate, and it’s been devastating. Really devastating,” Jason says, wiping away tears.
We also meet Annette, an older woman who recalls an unpleasant encounter with zero alcohol gin (“it left a taste of nettles”) and wonders why snow is associated with Christmas given that Jesus was born in the desert. Mary, meanwhile, talks about how Christmas can trigger her eating disorder – and recollects a doctor telling her parents that the best “cure” for her condition was to eat potatoes. This is when what 13. She is now 48 and has not touched a potato since.
Another local laments the agony of Christmas alone. “Some songs, I do start crying. I’d be thinking of all the things my mother used to be at,” he says, before recalling the day his beloved mother died. “The squad car came first, then the hearse. A shiver came all around my body. That’s how I knew the mother was dead.”
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So This Is Christmas review: Beautifully made but ultimately cheerless viewing – a glimmer of hope would have been nice
Their stories are compelling, but goodness, they make for cheerless viewing. Obviously, Christmas has its challenges, but you can’t help but feel that Waldrop is slightly laying it on with a trowel. It’s also unclear what wider point the film is trying to make – that people suffer even during the season of goodwill? It’s hardly a devastating insight. We’ve all had tough Christmases: Wardrop isn’t telling us anything we don’t know already.
The glum theme is echoed by So This is Christmas’s forlorn look. A suffocating gloom hangs over Gort and nearby villages such as Labane. The sky is a grim frieze of greys and dark blues. Wardrop somehow makes even the Christmas lights seem purgatorial and dreary.
Such starkness is part of the Irish Christmas – but a glimmer of joy amid the dark would have helped this film hugely (that Christmas is a time of celebration is fleetingly acknowledged in the final 10 minutes).
The experiences that are shared are often moving, and you have to admire the flinty humour displayed by several of the subjects. But there is a difference between acknowledging the challenges of life and wallowing in misery, and This Is Christmas too often finds itself on the wrong side of that line.
