Cup of Cheer (2020)

Hallmark releases roughly 40 original Christmas movies per year. By 2020 they had produced over 150 of them. The formula is locked: a woman from the city, a man with a small business, a town called something like Snowberry Hollow, a corporate villain with no redemption arc, and a kiss under falling snow in act three. The formula is so airtight that satirizing it feels almost impossible. Almost.

Cup of Cheer, a 2020 Canadian comedy directed and co-written by Jake Horowitz, does not attempt to be subtle about any of this. It stars Storm Steenson as Mary, a journalist dispatched to the town of Snowy Heights to write a feel-good Christmas piece, who predictably falls for Chris (Alexander Oliver), the owner of a hot chocolate shop being squeezed out by a corporate chain moving in next door. Every single one of those plot points is a joke. The film knows you know the formula, and it leans into that knowledge with the reckless commitment of a sketch comedy troupe performing to an audience of 40 people on a Tuesday night.

Is Cup of Cheer Actually Funny?

Sometimes, yes. Horowitz and co-writer Andy Lewis drew their comedy playbook from Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker: pile on the gags, keep moving, accept that some will miss. The Globe and Mail's review invoked Airplane! and The Naked Gun as reference points, and the comparison is accurate in spirit if not in budget. There are running gags, blink-and-miss-it background jokes, and one extended bit involving a British time traveller named Arthur, played by Jacob Hogan, who demands that everyone pronounce his name "Authuh." That joke should not work as long as it does. It mostly works.

The film was shot in Orillia, Ontario in early 2020, on a budget that is clearly tight. What Horowitz traded in production value he invested in pace. The jokes come quickly enough that the flat ones don't linger, and when something lands, the cast is committed enough to sell it. Steenson and Oliver are the surprise of the film. The Globe and Mail noted that they are "so charming and well-matched that they could headline a genuine Hallmark Christmas movie." That is both high praise and a slightly cutting observation: the parody works partly because the leads are playing it completely straight.

The Hallmark Formula as a Comedy Target

Targeting Hallmark movies is not a new idea. The trouble is that the Hallmark formula is already self-aware in its own way. Its audience watches these films precisely because of the cliches, which makes parody difficult. You can't puncture something that has no pretensions. Horowitz's solution is to attack from a different angle: rather than mocking the formula by stepping outside it, he follows it faithfully while stuffing it full of wordplay, double entendres, and absurdist asides. The movie earns its parody credentials by committing to the bit rather than winking at the camera.

The corporate villain plot, which in a genuine Hallmark film would be resolved through the power of community spirit, gets handled here with some genuinely strange comic logic. The Morgenthau Plan, the 1944 post-war proposal for German disarmament, makes an appearance. That is the kind of joke that either gets a surprised laugh or complete silence, with little middle ground. Mrs. Clovenwitch, the town busybody played by Helly Chester, functions as the film's Greek chorus, appearing to deliver genre-mandated exposition with escalating deadpan absurdity.

What Doesn't Quite Work

At 94 minutes, Cup of Cheer runs longer than this kind of comedy can sustain. The Zucker-Abrahams model works best in tight bursts. Airplane! is 88 minutes, and it never really pauses. Horowitz's film has more downtime between jokes, and in those gaps the low budget becomes more visible and the romantic plot, which exists only to service the parody, doesn't have enough genuine warmth to carry the slack.

Critics were split fairly evenly. The film holds a 64% on Rotten Tomatoes from 14 reviews. Chris Knight of Postmedia gave it four stars out of five. Others found the joke-to-laugh ratio frustrating. Both reactions are defensible. This is a film where your tolerance for a particular comedy frequency will determine your experience almost entirely.

The Drive-In Premiere and VOD Release

The film premiered on November 5, 2020, at the 5 Drive-In in Oakville, Ontario, as the first half of a double bill with Bad Santa (2003). That pairing was not accidental. IndieCan Entertainment, which distributed the film, released it to VOD in Canada and the United States the following day. It found its audience on streaming platforms, which is the correct venue for this kind of low-budget seasonal comedy. Watching it alone on a laptop is fine. Watching it with a group of people who share a taste for self-referential absurdism is considerably better.

Steenson anchors the film with a performance that plays the Hallmark heroine entirely straight while the world around her quietly falls apart. That discipline is harder than it looks, and it's the main reason the film functions at all. Oliver matches her. The supporting cast, particularly Hogan's Arthur and Marshall as the well-meaning brother Keith, fill the genre roles efficiently while finding room for the film's particular brand of dumb-smart comedy.

The hot cocoa shop at the center of the plot is named, of course, something seasonally earnest. The corporate chain threatening it is named something slightly more ominous. Both names are jokes. Everything in Cup of Cheer is a joke. The trick Horowitz pulls off, imperfectly but genuinely, is making you care a small amount anyway.