Moving into a street where everyone knows everyone else can be pleasant right up to the moment someone demonstrates exactly how much they know. Christmas at the Kringles has a workable horror premise in the Severson family’s encounter with neighbors who have made permanent arrangements for holiday cheer. The new family is supposed to be grateful for the attention. The Kringles can treat any hesitation as a failure of neighborliness. That little piece of leverage is funny well before the film gets around to making it dangerous.
Ron Livingston and Rachel Bilson play Mark and Julie Severson, the parents who have to negotiate the family’s place in the new neighborhood. Livingston’s dry delivery is a good match for the first invitations. Mark can see that an encounter is strange without having sufficient evidence to justify the cost of making a fuss. Arden Myrin and Thomas Lennon bring a more concentrated energy to the other side of those exchanges. The more at ease the neighbors are with their customs, the more awkward it becomes for a newcomer to ask an elementary question. Somebody can close off a line of inquiry simply by treating it as rude.
Lewis made Willy’s Wonderland, another movie about an ordinary person discovering that a cheerful commercial surface can conceal some ugly obligations. Here the decorations have a better chance of implicating the people on either side of the door. The Seversons would like some of the things this neighborhood advertises. That makes their distaste most enjoyable when it has to coexist with the good impression they hoped to make. Livingston can make an obligatory smile last long enough to begin looking like a plea for somebody else to end the visit. The setup would sustain several more variations on that discomfort.
Kevin Lewis has a useful eye for how much of Christmas can become alarming if it stays out long enough. Saturated decorations ordinarily gain some of their pleasure from the promise that they will come down. A home with no off-season gives color and ornament a different effect. A horror comedy could keep getting mileage from the quiet work required to maintain that look, and from the person a family sends over to ask why you have stopped participating. Here much of that pressure is discharged once the Kringles’ intentions become explicit.
Rob Riggle arrives as a Santa whose presence makes clear how much the film wants to get out into the open and start swinging. There is fun in the unceremoniousness with which he attacks the familiar image. The film could put him in a funnier position if the cult’s world still operated on its own persuasive logic. Once the opposing sides have been drawn up, a joke has more difficulty changing the way anybody understands the neighborhood. It can raise the volume or adorn the next blow. It rarely brings back the vulnerable politeness of the family’s first encounters.
The size of the supporting cast initially promises more than one way to be a Kringle. Beverly D’Angelo’s presence as Mama K suggests an older source of authority than the ebullience on display at the neighbors’ door. The opportunities narrow once the film needs people mainly to move into position for the carnage. A family with its own notion of good behavior is an appealing comic antagonist because there can be penalties for the members who fail to uphold it. Giving that hierarchy more dramatic attention would make the household feel as specific in conflict as it does when everybody is saying hello.
The premise would have been meaner in a useful way if it had lingered on the advantages the Kringles can offer. New residents might want their children to have somewhere to go or their own celebrations to feel less lonely. Every favor would then make the next invitation harder to refuse. The film gets partway there through the performances, especially when someone has to thank a neighbor they would prefer to avoid. Its appetite for an effects-driven payoff puts a stop to the uneasy question of what kind of person would find the invitation genuinely appealing.
