Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Christmas Revisited’ on OWN, A Half-Baked Holiday Movie About Old Friends Reuniting At A Cabin For Christmas

After the death of their college friend, a group of 30-somethings reunite at his mountain cabin for Christmas to relive old memories, reveal some secrets, and look to the future in OWN’s Christmas Revisited.

CHRISTMAS REVISITED: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A group of friends watches home movies of themselves in college while hanging out in a snow-covered cabin in the mountains.

The Gist: A group of friends – Cam (Jaime Callica), Ida (Golden Madison), Johnny (Andrew Bushell), Jo (Tanyell Waivers), and Mercedes, a.k.a. Mer (Andrea Lewis) – have gathered at their friend Nate’s mountain cabin for Christmas. It’s a holiday trip that was long-planned, even before Nate’s sudden passing from an accident. Now, the festive holiday has turned into a nostalgia-packed gathering for the friends to reconnect, while mourning their friend.

Nate was the glue that held this little group together, and it seems they really could use some of his team-building spirit because they’ve turned into a bickering bunch in his absence. There’s clearly tension between Ida and Johnny (spoiler alert, they dated but then when she came out to him, he ghosted her), and Cam and Jo also have some history that’s left them uncomfortable to be around one another. Jo’s also a workaholic who had planned to skip out on the whole three-day trip and leave after one night to get back to her job as a social worker, but when a storm ices over the road, she’s unable to leave.

It turns out, everyone there is feeling uneasy or hiding secrets: Ida is a lesbian, Mer is getting divorced, and Johnny has a drinking problem that he uses to cover his loneliness. When the secrets come out, it’s hard for everyone to digest the fact that they’re all struggling and need to heal. But soon, they call a “family meeting” and it’s there that they finally reveal their true feelings.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? A group of friends mourning the death of one of their own and reliving the good old days while acknowledging their now-complicated lives? It’s The Big Chill with no music budget and more twinkle lights.

A Holiday Tradition: There’s a Christmas-decorating montage and hot cocoa drinking and gingerbread house-making galore!

Does the Title Make Any Sense?: The friends are revisiting their past at Christmas, but they’re not revisiting Christmas itself (if you want to get technical about it).

Our Take: I can’t tell what Christmas Revisited wants to be. It’s part holiday romance, as Jo and Cam work through their complicated past and tense bickering to finally realize their feelings for one another, but it’s also a film about the difficulties of adulting. (Weirdly enough, there are a few funny horror movie gags and funny jump scares that are spliced in for comic effect after the group jokes that being stranded in a cabin is like being in a slasher movie – it’s subtle and clever, but also entirely out of place.)

Throughout the film, the writing relies a bit too much on exposition-y memories of Nate to punctuate what the characters are going through (“Remember freshman year blackout? Nate hosted game night.” “Nate made everything better when he hosted that Christmas potluck sophomore year!” and literally nothing about it feels real.

The movie works best when it’s a meditation on friendship and young adulthood, but that’s overshadowed and cluttered by Jo and Cam’s constant annoyance with one another. Where it shines is in scenes where the characters actually open up about themselves and reveal their “new” selves to the friends they’ve fallen out of touch with. Unfortunately, it just takes an awfully long time to get there.

Parting Shot: The gang, along with Nate’s aunt Carolyn, celebrate Christmas Day together in the cabin in front of a fire. They all raise a glass and toast: “To Nate!”

Performance Worth Watching: As Ida, Golden Madison seems to be the only actor here who prefers subtlety in favor of overreacting.

Memorable Dialogue: “You know Nate enjoyed bringing people together,” Cam says of their old friend. And even in death, Nate is doing just that by bringing these people to his cabin!

Our Call: There could be a better film in here with a few adjustments and less of a reliance on wistful references to a character we never met, alas, like a rare Christmas ham, it needed more time to cook. SKIP IT.