This Keira Knightley Christmas caper could easily be called Fuck’d Actually. A sometimes uneasy melding of Peter’s Friends and Melancholia, writer-director Camille Griffin’s debut starts with weak Yuletide yuks before deepening into an end-of-the-world drama, as a bunch of besties wrestle with how to spend the remaining few hours of their life. As such, Silent Night (the filmmakers must be pissed Last Christmas was taken as a title) argues that the world ends not with a bang but with a Michael Bublé festive hit.
For its first act, Silent Night is a British Big Chill, as a group of old, coupled-up, private-school pals descend on a country pad owned by Nell (Keira Knightley) and Simon (Matthew Goode) for the holidays. So, we get flirty Sandra (Annabelle Wallis) and emasculated spouse Tony (Rufus Jones); drinking-to-self-medicate Alex (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) and sweary Bella (Lucy Punch); plus nice doctor James (Sopé Dìrísù) and the younger obligatory outsider, Sophie (Lily Rose-Depp). This early stuff is standard reunion-movie shenanigans — long-buried feelings and hidden resentments, spliffs in the greenhouse, laughing at old photos — in-between Christmas cock-ups (a sticky toffee pudding disaster), bratty kids and cooking mishaps (blood on the carrots is a hint of the darkness to come). At this stage, the characters feel wrapping-paper-thin — it’s tough to work out why they are friends, let alone spend the holidays together; the dynamics feel forced and their concerns and conflicts feel inconsequential.
Keira Knightley is the standout.
But slowly Silent Night takes hold. After a comedy version of saying grace at Christmas lunch, the elephant in the room starts to emerge: there are twisters on their way carrying a lethal poison that delivers a slow, agonising demise, and the government have issued suicide pills for a painless death. What follows is a thoughtful dramatisation of differing attitudes to eco-disaster and imminent doom, led by an unlikely source. For while the parents are bickering and dancing their troubles away to Irene Cara’s ‘Fame’, it’s up to Nell’s oldest son, Art (Jojo Rabbit’s Roman Griffin Davis, also the director’s son), to question the government-mandated death-sentencing, deliberating whether to take his chances.
Griffin is circling ideas of the uselessness of class and privilege in the face of oblivion, but the critiques feel blunt. And yet, helped by Lorne Balfe’s unsettling and affecting orchestral score, and Griffin’s clear-eyed, dispassionate tone, the film delivers strong moments (Trudie Styler in a moving vignette as Nell’s mother on video-call) that accumulate into an emotional power that seemed highly unlikely in the first third. Of the cast, Knightley is the standout, starting out as a stressed host worried about only allowing one potato per person, before revealing a steelier side when faced with impossible circumstances. The rest of the talented cast have very little to work with, leaving you to wonder how good Silent Night might have been with richer, more rounded characters. When facing Armageddon, choosing your companions is everything.
