How to Make Gravy (2024)

Most Christmas films are about people trying to get somewhere for the holidays. "How to Make Gravy" is about a man who cannot. Joe, played by Daniel Henshall, is writing a letter from prison on December 21 -- the date fans of Paul Kelly's original 1996 song know as Gravy Day -- and director Nick Waterman builds an entire feature around that single impossible distance between a man and his kitchen, his family, his life.

The film is the first original feature from the Australian streaming service BINGE, released on December 1, 2024. It was directed by Waterman, who co-wrote the screenplay with his wife, Megan Washington, the three-time ARIA Award-winning musician. That the film works as well as it does is partly because Washington knows Kelly's emotional register from the inside out. She did not simply adapt the song -- she built a world around its silences.

What the Song Became

Kelly's original track is barely four minutes long. A man named Joe writes to his brother Dan from prison. He will miss Christmas. He hopes Dan watches the kids. He explains, in specificity that is almost unbearable, exactly how to make the gravy. That detail -- the practical kindness of a man who knows he cannot be there, so he leaves instructions -- is what made the song a cultural touchstone across Australia for three decades. It did not chart when it was released. It grew in the dark, passed between people, until December 21 became an unofficial national occasion.

The film expands that letter into a full backstory. We learn how Joe ended up in prison: a Christmas family gathering that turns violent after his brother-in-law Roger (Damon Herriman) taunts him about losing his job. Joe's wife Rita (Agathe Rousselle) brings the children to visit but holds back, unwilling to expose them to a man still burning with unresolved anger. Enter Noel, a lifer played by Hugo Weaving, who becomes the reluctant mentor Joe did not ask for and badly needs.

None of this feels grafted on. Waterman and Washington were careful to honour the emotional logic of the song rather than just illustrate it. Joe is not a saint wronged by circumstance. He is a man with a temper who made a choice, and the film does not let him off that hook.

The Cast Makes It Land

Henshall carries the film. Joe is the kind of role that can easily tip into self-pity, and Henshall keeps him grounded -- remorseful without being sentimental, volatile without being cartoonish. You understand exactly why Rita is staying away, and you still want things to work out for him. That is a difficult balance.

Weaving's Noel is the film's secret weapon. A veteran prisoner who has made peace with his sentence, Noel functions as a kind of moral pressure applied quietly, over time. Weaving plays him with zero sentimentality. He is not there to save Joe; he is there to be honest with him. The scenes between the two men have a weight that the film earns rather than claims.

Kate Mulvany as Stella (Joe's sister) and Damon Herriman as her husband Roger give the family scenes real texture. Herriman in particular avoids making Roger simply hateable -- he is the kind of man who knows exactly which nerve to press, which makes him more interesting than a plain villain. Agathe Rousselle, making her English-language debut, brings a quiet precision to Rita. She is not cold; she is protecting her children with her eyes open. The distinction matters.

The Music, Which is Half the Film

Washington's original songs and Samuel Dixon's synth score do significant work here. Dixon is a Grammy Award-winning producer whose score sits somewhere between warmth and dread -- it sounds like memory, which is appropriate for a film about a man cataloguing everything he is missing. The soundtrack won the ARIA Award for Best Original Soundtrack at the 2025 ARIA Music Awards, and that recognition is deserved.

Paul Kelly's original song appears, but Waterman is smart about when. It does not arrive as a triumphant callback. It earns its place.

Where It Strains

At two hours, the film is longer than it needs to be. Some scenes in the family household repeat emotional beats the screenplay has already established. Luke Buckmaster at The Guardian described the film as veering toward sentimentalism, and he is not entirely wrong -- there are moments in the third act where the film tells you how to feel rather than trusting you to feel it. These are not fatal problems. They are the problems of a film that genuinely cares about its characters and occasionally overexplains that care.

The film received 15 AACTA nominations in 2025, including Best Film, Best Direction, and acting nominations for Henshall, Mulvany, Herriman, and Weaving. It won for Best Original Song ("Fine", credited to Megan Washington, Brendan Maclean, and The Prison Choir). That tally reflects how seriously the Australian film industry received it.

The Actual Christmas Argument

Is this a Christmas film? Rigidly speaking: yes, and a more honest one than most. Christmas in "How to Make Gravy" is not a backdrop for warmth. It is a measure of what Joe has lost and what the family is managing without him. The holiday amplifies absence the way holidays do in real life -- by making ordinary absence into something with a specific date attached to it.

Joe will not be at the table. He will not make the gravy. He wrote down how to do it anyway, because that is what you do when you love people and you have failed them. The film understands that impulse, and it builds 120 minutes around it without losing the thread.