RECENT WATCHES: The Advent Calendar (2021)

The novelty of setting a horror movie around Christmas is no longer enough to distinguish it. Grim spins were put on all the standard holiday traditions many years ago. There's more killer Santa movies than you can count, a dozen Krampus movies of varying pedigrees, and even a couple elf horror movies. Zombies, murderous toys, and demonic beasties have been added to the December movie tradition. One can't help but imagine a writer going down a list of Christmas activities and asking “Has anyone made a horror movie out of that one before?” I don't know, for a fact, if this is how Congolese/French-Belgium actor/filmmaker Patrick Ridgemont decided to make a movie about an evil advent calendar but one assumes. “The Advent Calendar” would be added to the canon of spooky holiday flicks this month when it premiered on Shudder. 

Following an automobile accident, Eva was left a paraplegic. She's learned to live with her condition, finding work and even communicating with her senile father sometimes. At the beginning of December, her friend Sophie brings her a strange advent calendar from Germany. The calendar comes with several ominous rules and warnings, written from an entity calling itself “Ich.” Eva opens it up anyway, receiving several treats... And also unleashing a diabolic curse that she must see through to Christmas day. The evil inside the calendar slowly returns her ability to walk but only in exchange for increasingly grisly sacrifices.

Mythologies around the world are full of spirits and entities that grant wishes but only at a terrible price. We've certainly seen this idea crop up in horror movies over the years, with the “Wishmaster” series only being the most obvious example. “The Advent Calendar” follows in this tradition too. The entity possessing the box slowly returns Eva's ability to walk to her, at the cost of multiple people – including friends and loved ones – dying around her. Yet, as is sometimes the case with movies like this, “Advent Calendar” gets a little bogged down in its own rules before the end. The climax is an especially baffling attempt to find a loophole in the calendar's rule book. 

Yet the lore eventually becoming convoluted is not the main problem with “The Advent Calendar.” Unsurprisingly, a movie about a killer advent calendar is – go figure – pretty silly. The first victim claimed by the box is a sleazy broker who assaults her. He dies when a toy replica of his car slides out of the calendar and is chewed up by Eva's adorable dog. This is not the last time the movie attempts to engineer thrills around the cute pooch. Later, the little guy also kills Eva's abusive boss off-screen. From the moment the box actually started talking to Eva, I figured “The Advent Calendar” was a pretty goofy movie. By the time Eva's closest friend is humped to death by her boyfriend, after he takes some Viagra provided by the calendar, the movie had drifted into the arena of total ridiculousness. “The Advent Calendar” plays these silly sequences totally straight too, suggesting this is either genuine unintentional B-movie humor or the most deadpan of horror/comedy. 

“The Advent Calendar” is well assembled in a lot of technical ways. The cinematography is decent and features some colorful bisexual lighting. (Which is almost as commonplace in indie horror now as synth soundtracks.) The special effects aren't bad, as Ich is a suitably intimidating pseudo-cenobite monster. The performances are fairly sturdy, Eugénie Derouand at least being sort of compelling as Eva. But there's a problem with her too. About halfway through the film, Eva stops fighting back against the advent calendar. She accepts that these horrible things are going to happen to everyone around her and there's nothing she can do about it. In fact, she embraces it, even using a voodoo doll-like figurine the calendar provides to brutally murder a work rival. If an ostensibly still sympathetic protagonist has slowly become an unrepentant psychopath, that might be a scripting issue. 

Ultimately, “The Advent Calendar” tackling its preposterous premise and ideas with nary a wink at the audience almost won me over. In an age where every genre picture is super self-aware, a part of me wants to treasure a goofy horror flick that some convictions behind its dumb-ass ideas. Yet the movie is ultimately not funny or spirited enough to make me a fan. It's also too long, stretching over the 85 minute sweet spot for a story like this. Aside from its central tchotchke of doom, “The Advent Calendar” is short on Christmas atmosphere too. As far as 2021's holiday horror offerings go, I guess I preferred it over “Silent Night” and “Black Friday,” though by a pretty small margin. [5/10]