Father Christmas Is Back (2021)
Four sisters – Caroline, Joanna, Paulina, and Vicky – reunite for the Christmas Holiday in a Yorkshire mansion. However, their estranged father, James, joins in for the first time since he left the family behind decades prior. The group attempts to get through the holiday despite comedic misunderstandings, while also uncovering the long-buried secret that tore their family apart, so many years ago.
rating 5/10 User rating 171 votes 46% ❄ Christmas Connection
The entire film takes place at a Yorkshire country manor over the Christmas holiday, with sisters reuniting, decorating, feuding, and eventually reconciling in front of a roaring fire. Father Christmas himself is the name the absent patriarch goes by, making Christmas both the setting and the central metaphor. Without Christmas, there is no film.
Where to Watch
Our Review
There is a particular species of British Christmas film that mistakes a stately home and a recognizable face for a screenplay. Father Christmas Is Back, released on Netflix in November 2021, belongs firmly to this category. It has Elizabeth Hurley, John Cleese, Kelsey Grammer, a Grade II listed manor in Yorkshire, and approximately forty minutes of actual jokes spread across a hundred-and-five-minute runtime. The question is not whether it's a great Christmas film. The question is whether that's a problem.
Honestly, it depends on your tolerance for chaos dressed up as festivity.
The Setup: Four Sisters, One Absent Father
The premise is a decent one. Four adult sisters, the Christmas-Hope siblings (yes, that is their surname), reunite at Caroline's posh ancestral manor in North Yorkshire. Caroline, played by Nathalie Cox, has spent months perfecting a picture-perfect Christmas. Her sisters are less cooperative. Then their father James, long absent, shows up uninvited. He calls himself Father Christmas. He is played by Kelsey Grammer in full charm-offensive mode, which means he's doing a lot of warm smiling and very little explaining himself.
Elizabeth Hurley plays Joanna, the glamorous one. Talulah Riley plays Paulina, the religious one. April Bowlby plays Vicky, the American-adjacent one. John Cleese is the grandfather, essentially doing a John Cleese impression, which is either a gift or a distraction depending on your feelings about John Cleese impressions. Caroline Quentin plays the mother. Ray Fearon and Kris Marshall are the husbands who stand around looking baffled.
That is a lot of people for one film to manage, and it doesn't quite manage them.
What Works: The Cast Earns Their Keep
The film's greatest asset is that nobody in this cast is phoning it in. Hurley clearly enjoys playing someone this unapologetically vain and scheming. Grammer gives Grammer-level charm. Cleese, who has done this kind of material before and better, still gets at least two genuine laughs from sheer delivery. The cast is working harder than the script deserves, and there are stretches of twenty minutes that clip along pleasantly enough on the strength of the ensemble.
Birdsall House, the real Yorkshire estate used as Dunnock Manor, deserves a credit of its own. It's genuinely beautiful. The cinematography makes the most of it, particularly during exterior shots with frost and bare trees. If you are the type of person who watches Christmas films partly for the houses, this one delivers on that front.
What Doesn't: A Script That Mistakes Noise for Comedy
The problems are structural. Directors Philippe Martinez and Mick Davis let scenes run until they collapse rather than cutting them at their peak. Subplots are introduced and then abandoned. The sisters' central conflict, which should drive the emotional stakes of the film, gets resolved with a speed that suggests the writers ran out of time rather than that the characters actually earned their reconciliation.
The comedy is also uneven in a specific way. British ensemble comedies live or die by escalation: you set up a misunderstanding, you compound it, you compound it again, and then you release the pressure. This film sets up misunderstandings and then wanders off into the next scene. The rhythm is wrong. The laughs that do land tend to come from individual line readings rather than from any constructed comic situation.
Kelsey Grammer's character is the biggest missed opportunity. Father Christmas arriving unannounced at Christmas with a cloud of absence behind him is a premise with genuine dramatic potential. The film treats this almost entirely as farce. That's a legitimate choice, but the farce isn't sustained or escalated well enough to compensate for the lack of anything underneath.
The Christmas Credentials
On the Christmas-film spectrum, this one sits squarely in the decorative middle. The manor is decked impeccably. There are mulled wine scenes and family dinner scenes and a general atmosphere of too many people in a big house doing too many things at once. It captures the particular chaos of a large family Christmas rather well, even if it doesn't do much with that chaos dramatically.
The title works against it slightly. Call your film Father Christmas Is Back and you're implying something more mythic than what's delivered. The father isn't Father Christmas in any supernatural sense. He just calls himself that, which is more pathetic than enchanting, which might have been an interesting angle to explore seriously. The film doesn't.
It's a perfectly watchable 105 minutes that you won't remember much of by the 26th. Caroline Quentin's comic timing is the sharpest thing in it. The Yorkshire locations are lovely. John Cleese falls down a hill. If that sentence makes you want to watch it, you will have a fine time.
Fun Facts
Filming took place at Birdsall House, a Grade II* listed historic estate near Malton in North Yorkshire, in September 2020, over a year before the film's November 2021 release on Netflix.
The film was produced by MSR Media, a York-based production company, making it one of the few major Netflix Christmas releases with regional British production roots outside London.
Kelsey Grammer filmed another movie, Miss Willoughby and the Haunted Bookshop (2021), in the same Yorkshire market town of Howden during what appears to have been a prolific British filming stint.
The fictional family at the center of the film is named the Christmas-Hopes, making the word "Christmas" literally part of their surname and not just the setting of the film.
John Cleese, who plays the grandfather, was 81 at the time of the film's release in November 2021, making him one of the oldest lead cast members in a Netflix original Christmas film that year.
The film has a sequel: Christmas in Paradise (2022), which reunites several cast members and shifts the setting to sunnier climes, a direction that suggests the Yorkshire manor was not as beloved by the production as it appears on screen.
The screenplay was written by Hannah Davis, David Connolly, and Dylanne Corcoran, based on an original story by director Philippe Martinez, giving the film a credit list of four writers, which may partly explain the tonal inconsistencies in the final cut.
Cast
