A relatively low-budget Christmas horror anthology - think Holiday Hell (2019) rather than A Christmas Horror Story (2015), and if you're OK with that you'll probably be entertained.
It's not an art film, or an artsy one; I'm not sure where anyone would get that. The wraparound story does feature a couple attending a play on Christmas Eve at a very small theatre without knowing what to expect. They're subjected to a few nearly identically-clad performers giving performances with only the barest of props and no sets, and certainly *that play* is arty, but done tongue-in-cheek by the filmmakers. Relatively little is seen of the play; just the beginning and ends of the play's acts, to bookend the segments of the movie's anthology. The two theatre-goers find it off-putting and somewhat funny; the few other watching are even less engaged. The performances are very stripped-down versions of the anthology's segments, to the point of abstraction at times. A neighbor's oppressively bright and loud outdoor Christmas decorations in the play become just a large red light and a large green light held in one of the performers' hands; blood becomes just red ribbons.
One of the sins anthologies can commit is having segments that might as well have been combined, but here the different segments of the movie have very different stories. With five segments and a wraparound story, none of them are especially long.
The directors had only done short films prior to this one. One might see this film as them continuing to develop their skills while making short films but using the anthology format to give those shorts more of a market. That's probably a good thing; one of the sins that low-budget filmmakers make is jumping into a feature when they clearly lacked the skills to make even a short. These directors show promise; I thought it compared favorably with Holiday Hell (2019), for example, and that movie had Jeffrey Combs to help it. The abstract theatre was a far more creative device than HH's curio shop, which is rather a cliché: Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (1924), From Beyond the Grave (1974), Friday the 13th: The Series (1987) (TV Series), etc.
It's not an art film, or an artsy one; I'm not sure where anyone would get that. The wraparound story does feature a couple attending a play on Christmas Eve at a very small theatre without knowing what to expect. They're subjected to a few nearly identically-clad performers giving performances with only the barest of props and no sets, and certainly *that play* is arty, but done tongue-in-cheek by the filmmakers. Relatively little is seen of the play; just the beginning and ends of the play's acts, to bookend the segments of the movie's anthology. The two theatre-goers find it off-putting and somewhat funny; the few other watching are even less engaged. The performances are very stripped-down versions of the anthology's segments, to the point of abstraction at times. A neighbor's oppressively bright and loud outdoor Christmas decorations in the play become just a large red light and a large green light held in one of the performers' hands; blood becomes just red ribbons.
One of the sins anthologies can commit is having segments that might as well have been combined, but here the different segments of the movie have very different stories. With five segments and a wraparound story, none of them are especially long.
The directors had only done short films prior to this one. One might see this film as them continuing to develop their skills while making short films but using the anthology format to give those shorts more of a market. That's probably a good thing; one of the sins that low-budget filmmakers make is jumping into a feature when they clearly lacked the skills to make even a short. These directors show promise; I thought it compared favorably with Holiday Hell (2019), for example, and that movie had Jeffrey Combs to help it. The abstract theatre was a far more creative device than HH's curio shop, which is rather a cliché: Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (1924), From Beyond the Grave (1974), Friday the 13th: The Series (1987) (TV Series), etc.