I wasn’t going to watch this film but after seeing all the hype I decided to watch it, and my only reaction was: ‘well that was stupid’.

A Castle for Christmas follows an American writer who has recently written her newest book and everyone in America hated it, so she decided to go back to her roots in Scotland to visit a castle that her grandfather lived in when he was a boy. However the present owner, the Duke, also known as Dr Gordon from Saw, isn’t too happy with this woman casually turning up and wants her to be gone as soon as possible, but still need her money because the castle is in disrepair.

Now that all sounds lovely, it’s a sweet, simple story of Christmas and love and friendship and of course you have the haters to lovers storyline intertwined too. However the issue with this film is it seem to be wrapped up too well and too quickly. When the two haters become lovers there is still half an hour of the movie left but nowhere to go with it, and so the lovers quarrel that we always see in these sort of romcoms comes out of the blue from nowhere, when really it should never have happened because everything was peachy and fine anyway.

I feel that the issue with this film is that they had a great story that they wanted to follow but then they didn’t have the casual romantic comedy cliches that we always expect to see, and so these were just shoved in willy-nilly where they thought they would work, but because they were shoved in and not thought through properly they didn’t fit the narrative that was being shown to us. This film didn’t need a big fight scene between the two main characters, this film didn’t need a lot of the moments that cause drama because there was enough drama in it already, and unfortunately it just wasn’t done very well. While the film has a very high budget it seems from the styling of it and the locations and camerawork, the actual execution is very underwhelming and really quite jarring at times and reminds me of a student film.

For me this is not a Christmas movie that I would watch again and I feel a lot of people who do love Christmas films may feel the same way. It felt like it was created as a quick cash grab because Netflix knew that audiences would enjoy it and so they could cut corners that bigger films, that may not have that audience retention as much as Netflix does, wouldn’t be able to make because people would fall off of it immediately. I definitely feel there are better Christmas films out there, especially if you still want to go down the romcom route, however with this one it’s not something that I would watch again because it was too sloppily put together and wasn’t that enjoyable.

What do you think of A Castle for Christmas?

Until next time.

Published by shonaharding

Media graduate with a passion for reviewing film and TV. View all posts by shonaharding