Christmas at the Kringles Review: A Bizarre, Unfunny Holiday Nightmare

Every once in a while, a film comes along that feels less like a finished motion picture and more like an elaborate prank pulled on the audience. It’s next to impossible to decipher what’s going on in Christmas at the Kringles, or whom this bizarre hybrid of holiday comedy and slasher horror was even made for. Directed by Kevin Lewis, the filmmaker behind the Five Nights at Freddy‘s ripoff Willy‘s Wonderland, and written by Zack Imbrogno, the movie claims to have it all, assuming “it all” is the result of a feverish, drug-addled delusion.

Christmas at the Kringles Review

The story follows Mark Severson (Ron Livingston), a perpetually jaded family man who relocates from an unnamed big city to an equally generic suburban neighborhood with his dim-witted wife, Julie Severson (Rachel Bilson), and their boring son, Bobby Severson (Jack Jewkes). Everything in this town is slightly off-kilter, starting with the obnoxious family next door. Led by Nick Kringle (Thomas Lennon) and the aggressively chipper Carol Kringle (Arden Myrin), the neighbors belong to a literal Christmas cult in which every single day of the year is treated like the 25th of December.

Premise aside, what kills the movie right out of the gate is how visually flat and lifeless it looks. For a massive chunk of the runtime, the Seversons don’t even have furniture, leaving them to stand around an empty, gray house to the point where you completely forget the story takes place during the holidays. Lewis is clearly trying to juxtapose the dreary routine of our main family against the hyper-festive madness of the Kringles, but the contrast just makes the film look dull, cheap, and unpleasant to watch.

That visual lethargy bleeds directly into the cast. Livingston has built an entire career on playing slow-talking, disillusioned men, yet here he delivers the most bored performance of his life, looking so checked out that some of his scenes become unintentionally hilarious. Halfway through, everyone on screen seems to give up except for Lennon, who plays Nick at a permanent 11. His manic commitment wraps all the way around, from funny to obnoxious and back again, which is more than can be said for the weak, grating performances by the child actors.

Once most of the ensemble checks out, the script starts tossing completely disconnected ideas at the wall to pad the runtime. Out of nowhere, Mark mentions that he works as a trader, prompting Nick to brag about flipping “shitcoins” online for massive returns. This launches a baffling subplot in which Mark gets sucked into buying a reindeer-themed meme coin that skyrockets and crashes, without ever affecting the central story. It’s just as aimless as the scenes featuring neighbor Daryl (Donald Faison), who goes on endless, humorless tangents about OnlyFans and living in his mother’s garage because the writers clearly couldn’t figure out what else to do with him.

Things only get weirder with the introduction of Drunk Santa (Rob Riggle), who plays an actual, literal Santa Claus. At one point, Riggle unironically rants about how people are trying to “cancel Christmas,” a line that lands like a bizarre cultural dog whistle for whatever point the movie thinks it’s making. Later on, the film abruptly pivots into a five-minute fight sequence just to inject some action into the doldrums. The brawl drags on for so long that it accidentally becomes funny purely because of how ridiculously stupid the choreography and pacing are.

When Christmas at the Kringles remembers it’s supposed to be a horror movie, it proves far too timid to actually scare anyone. After staging a single kill in the opening minutes, the film coasts on that lone moment of violence while spending the next forty-five minutes watching the Kringles act vaguely creepy, like casually mentioning they have a favorite child and dislike the rest of their kids. Meanwhile, Julie grows distant from Mark, goes caroling every night with the neighbors, and drinks poisoned “Yule tea” that brainwashes her into joining their cult through lazy magic the script never bothers to explain.

It’s genuinely baffling to imagine the pitch meeting for this project, which reads as a half-baked joke left on a studio whiteboard that someone accidentally greenlit. Between the unearned emotional beats, the raunchy humor, and the toothless holiday slasher tropes, there is no logical target audience for Christmas at the Kringles. Watching it, you can’t help but wonder how dozens of crew members spent months working on this set without someone stepping in to ask if any of it made sense, because the finished cut feels like the director is just shrugging at the camera.

Is Christmas at the Kringles worth watching?

Saying there’s very little meat on this bone wouldn’t quite be accurate. Christmas at the Kringles is a bone covered in gristle and odd chunks of spoiled meat that clearly belong to several different animals. It’s never disturbing enough to work as horror, and it never has the guts to do anything genuinely fun with its absurdity. Even when you catch yourself smiling at how ineptly made it all is, there’s no excusing a neurotic, laughably bad experiment that feels like it’s mocking you for paying attention.

Christmas at the Kringles releases in theaters on October 30.

Christmas at the Kringles Review: A Bizarre, Unfunny Holiday Nightmare