Holidate (2020)

Netflix released Holidate in October 2020, positioning it as a holiday movie for people who don't really like holiday movies. The premise is simple: Sloane (Emma Roberts) and Jackson (Luke Bracey), both single and tired of family interrogations at every gathering, agree to be each other's no-strings plus-one for every holiday of the year. It sounds like the setup for a Hallmark movie, except the script has a mouth on it and nobody is renovating an inn in Vermont.

A Year of Holidays, One Fake Relationship

Director John Whitesell structures the film as a calendar-year sprint through American holidays. New Year's Eve, Valentine's Day, Cinco de Mayo, the Fourth of July, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas each get their own segment, essentially turning the movie into a series of comedic vignettes held together by one central question: how long before these two stop pretending?

The answer is obvious from minute five. That's not a flaw; it's the genre.

What keeps things moving is the chemistry between Roberts and Bracey. Roberts plays Sloane as sharp, slightly bitter, and allergic to sentimentality. Bracey's Jackson is the laid-back Australian counterpart who treats every holiday like a sporting event. Their dynamic works best in the early holiday segments, where the fake-relationship logistics create genuine comedy. A Valentine's Day dinner with an overeager waiter. A Mother's Day brunch where family boundaries dissolve. These set pieces land because the script by Tiffany Paulsen lets both characters be selfish and petty rather than secretly noble.

The Supporting Cast Does the Heavy Lifting

Kristin Chenoweth shows up as Sloane's Aunt Susan, a woman who treats holidays as competitive contact sports and romantic entanglements as spectator entertainment. Chenoweth gets maybe fifteen minutes of screen time and steals every second of it. Her delivery alone is worth the price of a Netflix subscription you're already paying for.

Frances Fisher plays Sloane's mother Elaine with the specific brand of passive aggression that makes holiday family dinners a universal experience. Andrew Bachelor (King Bach) and Jake Manley round out the ensemble as Jackson's friend and Sloane's brother, respectively. The movie is at its best when it lets these supporting players bounce off the leads rather than sidelining them for extended romantic montages.

Is Holidate Actually a Christmas Movie?

Barely. Christmas bookends the film: the story opens on December 26 with both Sloane and Jackson suffering through post-holiday returns at the mall, and it closes on Christmas Eve when the inevitable confession of real feelings arrives on schedule. But the bulk of the runtime covers non-Christmas holidays. If you're looking for snow-covered streets, tree-trimming scenes, and a wall-to-wall holiday soundtrack, this isn't it.

That said, the Christmas scenes carry the most emotional weight. The opening captures the specific misery of being single during the holidays with uncomfortable accuracy. And the finale uses a Christmas Eve party as the backdrop for a public declaration of love that somehow works despite being the most predictable scene in the entire movie. The Christmas framing gives the film its emotional bookends, even if the middle is all fireworks and fake blood from a memorably gruesome Halloween segment.

Where It Falls Apart

The movie's biggest problem is pacing. At 104 minutes, it sags in the middle stretch when the holiday-hopping formula starts to feel mechanical. The Cinco de Mayo and Fourth of July sequences blur together, and a subplot involving Jackson's ex-girlfriend and Sloane's new love interest feels like padding designed to delay the inevitable by twenty minutes.

The humor also leans heavily on raunchy gags that don't all land. A running joke about a store called "Holidate" that sells holiday-themed lingerie is the kind of bit that's funny once and then gets repeated three more times. Paulsen's script is sharpest when it targets the social performance of holidays rather than going for gross-out laughs.

What It Gets Right

For all its formula, Holidate understands something real about modern holiday fatigue. The pressure to perform happiness at family gatherings, to have a partner for every photo op, to pretend you love Secret Santa when you got a scented candle for the fourth year running. Roberts and Bracey play two people who've opted out of the performance, only to discover they've accidentally opted into something genuine.

The film's best scene is a quiet one: Sloane and Jackson sitting on a curb after a disastrous Thanksgiving dinner, splitting a bottle of wine and admitting they actually enjoy each other's company. No orchestral swell. No comedic interruption. Just two people being honest for ninety seconds before the movie remembers it's a Netflix comedy and puts them back on the treadmill.

That curb scene is what Holidate could have been if it trusted its leads more and its formula less. Instead, it's a perfectly adequate streaming rom-com that you'll enjoy on the couch, forget by January, and probably watch again next October when Netflix puts it back on the homepage.