Happiest Season, review: a doleful Kristen Stewart makes Christmas a vale of tears

• Dir: Clea DuVall; Cast: Kristen Stewart, Mackenzie Davis, Aubrey Plaza, Dan Levy, Mary Steenburgen, Victor Garber, Alison Brie, Mary Holland. 12 cert, 102 min

“Home for the holidays” is a classic – dare we say overused – set-up for festive flicks that oscillate between laughter and tears. There’s a wide spectrum: you could set Ingmar Bergman’s evergreen Fanny and Alexander (1982) on a giant pedestal by the fireplace, then scrape out the toe-end of the stocking for such Lidl-bargain-bin fare as Four Christmases (2008) and The Family Stone (2005).

Happiest Season is an example of such a film, but with a coming-out twist – one which, in 2020, isn’t much of a twist. As far back as 1995, Jodie Foster directed Home for the Holidays, an underrated classic of the form which had a plum gay role for Robert Downey Jr, yet didn’t engineer any huge dramas around it – his conspiratorial relationship with Holly Hunter as his put-upon sister was truthful, funny and well-observed.

It’s on this count especially that writer-director Clea DuVall, long a cherishable mainstay on the American indie scene as an actress, has let herself down. Her film is without any slyness, mischief, or the sense of us-against-the-world defiance you’d hope for, especially given the cast involved. Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis are a screen couple we’d root for in just about any context but this: they’re soon at loggerheads, they start to seem plain wrong for each other, and the plot just winds up putting you in a bad mood.

All the friction comes from the fact that Harper (Davis), who’s one of three daughters in a rich conservative family, isn’t “out” to her folks. No sooner has she impulsively invited her girlfriend Abby (Stewart), a Christmasphobic orphan, to the traditional knees-up at her parents’ lavish manse, than she’s regretting it and trying to backtrack. Too late.

Harper’s father (Victor Garber) is a city councilman running for mayor, to which end her gregarious hostess of a mother (Mary Steenburgen) has discovered the influencing power of Instagram: as she festoons their house for a grand gathering, everything must look just so. It’s certainly not the moment to mess things up with the scandalous announcement that Daddy’s favourite has a female partner, or has in fact been a lesbian since her college days.

While Abby had been all set to propose on this trip, she finds herself put up alone in the basement bedroom and explained away as Harper’s orphaned flatmate, invited out of pity. Meanwhile, Harper transforms into a totally different person around her relatives – especially her married sister Sloane (Alison Brie), a terrifyingly hostile woman with whom she’s incessantly in combat about nothing and everything.

While DuVall wants to make the still-valid point that family hang-ups can revert even the best of us to a fearful state of denial, she frosts over her romance with the panic of imagined homophobia, and snuffs it out by mistake. Wheeled on are not just one but two of Harper’s ex-partners (Jake McDorman, and an underused Aubrey Plaza) to make the situation as awkward, jealousy-packed and soap-operatic as possible.

It badly needs more laughs. Schitt’s Creek’s Dan Levy holds up the comedy end practically alone, as a bossy pal of Abby being an absurd agony-aunt down the phone. This guy might be an exact clone of David Rose, his Schitt’s character, down to the mitten jumpers, but his loose, improv-happy routines provide a merciful break from the script’s lockstep tensions. Steenburgen’s a frisky pro, as she always is, and co-writer Mary Holland has a fresh take on the third sister, a cheery if clueless soul with a host of eager projects no one cares about.

Stewart is simply too good an actress to miss the loneliness of Abby, feeling like a sore thumb ignored by the person she loves, and Davis, while poor company through the middle, does solid dramatic work when the truth tumbles out. But the film’s a shrugging downer, scarcely bothering with its shot choices, and not jollied along by any helpful sparkle, any style. A Yule this squabble-packed and glum needs more than your average happy-ever-after to come good in the end.

Available on Amazon Prime, iTunes and other platforms from November 26