How About You... (2007)

The Hardcore Take on Christmas

Most Christmas films hand you a fireplace, some snow, and a tidy miracle. How About You (2007) hands you four furious senior citizens, a panicking twenty-something, and a crumbling Irish manor house in County Wicklow -- and somehow wrings something genuinely warm out of the chaos. Directed by Anthony Byrne and adapted by Jean Pasley from Maeve Binchy's short story "The Hard Core," the film is small in scale and enormous in charm, carried almost entirely on the backs of four legendary performers who look like they are having the time of their lives.

Ellie Harris, played by a then-emerging Hayley Atwell, is the younger sister of Kate, who runs Kilmore House, a posh residential care home set amid the rolling green hills of Wicklow. When a family emergency pulls Kate away just before Christmas, Ellie is left in charge of the handful of residents who have not gone home to spend the holidays with family. These four -- a disgraced judge, a faded screen star, a pair of warring sisters -- are so difficult, so deliberately antisocial, that the staff calls them "the Hardcore." They are not wrong.

Four Terrors, One Very Overwhelmed Young Woman

Joss Ackland plays Donald Vanston, a former judge whose appetite for whiskey cost him his career and whose sharp tongue has cost him every friendship since. Vanessa Redgrave plays Georgia Platts, a former stage and screen actress who has retreated from public life and fills her days watching classic films in her room. Imelda Staunton and Brenda Fricker play Petula and Winnie, sisters who have been bickering since long before they arrived at Kilmore House and show no intention of stopping now.

The chemistry among this quartet is the entire reason to watch the film. Redgrave brings a melancholy grandeur to Georgia that feels genuinely earned -- this is a woman who once commanded stages and now commands a single armchair. Staunton, reliably magnificent, makes Petula's prickliness feel like armour rather than cruelty. Ackland plays Vanston with the weary bitterness of a man who knows he has wasted something irreplaceable. Fricker, the most quietly funny of the four, gives Winnie a pragmatic warmth that sneaks up on you.

Atwell holds the centre with real confidence for an actor in her first feature film. Ellie is not a cipher -- she has her own mess of a life, her own history of running from responsibility -- and Atwell lets you see both the terror and the gradual, grudging affection. The film uses her as the audience's entry point into a world of people who have lived too long and seen too much to pretend Christmas is anything but complicated.

Wicklow Does the Heavy Lifting

The production shot for six weeks at Mount Usher Gardens in Ashford, County Wicklow, with additional scenes filmed in Rostrevor, County Down in Northern Ireland. The choice of setting matters enormously. Kilmore House is not a sterile medical facility -- it is a Georgian manor with gardens, drawing rooms, and the kind of creaking grandeur that makes you believe people would fight to stay there. The Irish winter light, cool and slightly melancholy, gives every outdoor shot a particular quality that no studio set could replicate.

Director Byrne keeps things moving without rushing. He understands that the pleasures here are cumulative -- the small thaws, the reluctant confessions, the moments where someone's defences slip just enough to let another person in. The Christmas setting is not decoration but structure. The holiday forces proximity, forces memory, forces the question of why these four people have no one to go home to. The film is kind enough not to answer that question too simply.

Warm Without Being Saccharine

Critics who called the film a "Hallmark Movie of the Week" were not entirely wrong about the formula, but they missed what the cast does inside that formula. The script finds genuine darkness in the Hardcore's isolation. Vanston's alcoholism is played for laughs but also for the genuine loss underneath. Georgia's retreat from public life hints at disappointments the film never fully explains, which is the right choice. Petula and Winnie's mutual antagonism clearly masks something older and more painful.

The comedy is gentle but not toothless. There is a running gag involving the residents' contraband whiskey that escalates pleasingly, and a scene involving Ellie's attempts to organise a Christmas dinner that tips into farce without losing its emotional stakes. The film earns its ending because it has done the work of making you care about people it spent an hour convincing you were impossible to like.

This is a Christmas film about loneliness that is also, genuinely, about the possibility of connection even late in life. It does not oversell that possibility. The Hardcore will not be transformed by one remarkable Christmas into different people. But they might, briefly, allow themselves to be a little less alone. In the context of the holiday season, that is more than enough.

Mount Usher Gardens, where most of the film was shot, was designed in the "Robinsonian" style by the Walpole family beginning in 1868 and covers roughly 22 acres along the River Vartry -- making it one of Ireland's most atmospheric and least expected film locations.