Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point: an enchantingly odd festive hangout movie

Tyler Taormina’s unforgettably eerie coming-of-age mystery Ham on Rye (2019) showed that the melancholy evocation of mood and place was his strong suit. The joy is less adulterated in his second full-length film, Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, though that doesn’t mean that things are any more straightforward. The film begins with a dedication: “For the lost, may they find their way home on Christmas Eve.” The temptation is to ask whether “the lost” includes the audience. Complete comprehension in this portrait of the Balsano family’s festive shindig remains, for the most part, just out of reach. A soundtrack of vintage pop favourites (the Ronettes, the Crystals) and seasonal standards (‘Jingle Bells’) gives the impression of a kind of uniform EveryPast. But as suggested by the opening nocturnal tour of a suburbia strewn with fairy-lights, photographed upside down, or the mangled Dickens line near the end (“God bless them, and us, everyone”), this is almost the Christmas we all know, but not quite.

Perhaps that is why a sub-plot involving two cops (played by Michael Cera, who also produced, and Gregg Turkington, co-star of the peerless spoof web series On Cinema at the Cinema, 2011-) feels like the movie’s one weak element: their dynamic is too clearly defined in comic terms to suit a picture otherwise militantly opaque. Their presence does fit a pattern of echoes and allusions that reverberate through the film. Cera, remember, got an early break in Superbad (2007), which also featured two cops (Bill Hader and Seth Rogen) divorced awkwardly from the main action. Adding to the sense of continuity is the casting of Francesca Scorsese, apposite in this portrait of a rambunctious Italian-American clan and no less delightful here than in Luca Guadagnino’s TV series We Are Who We Are (2020) or any of her TikTok videos with her befuddled father.

Steven Spielberg’s son Sawyer plays a more wistful version of one of the drop-outs (“The failures”, someone calls them here) from Ham on Rye. His presence draws the eye to a shot of a crescent moon that resembles an inverted DreamWorks logo, and another looking down on a grid of lit streets that recalls E.T. The Extra Terrestrial (1982). The vibe of Taormina’s film is generally in tune with the Spielberg-produced Gremlins (1984), right down to an elderly woman in a stairlift. Something powerful is being communicated here about shared cultural history, a line of enquiry that reaches its apogee with the playing of old VHS tapes of bygone Balsano get-togethers. The camera zooms into the video itself, mingling with the revellers filling the dance floor, before returning to the present day.

A sharper eye for oddball festive detail there hasn’t been since Lynne Ramsay’s short Gasman (1998). Some tableaux are deliberately familiar – a young boy’s squeamishness as kisses are administered from every available angle by every available auntie – others less so. There is the customary abundance of food, though an overhead tracking shot of the exotic-looking banquet reveals nothing immediately identifiable. “Salami sticks again this year, Ray?” someone asks of a pink, finger-like snack. A dog presses its paws against the window, gazing out forlornly at an ornamental deer in a nod to All That Heaven Allows (1955). When Santa Claus’s sleigh passes through the neighbourhood on the back of a truck, the camera zeroes in on one child whose shrill, sustained screams teeter between delight and horror. The scene fades to red: Santa or blood?

Though the rest of the film flirts with menace – the hunt for a figure known as Dragonfire; a child sleeping with arms folded across his chest, vampire-style – it comes down more or less in favour of communal ritual and nostalgia. There are early hints that violence might be in the offing. A videogame ends with the words “Terrorists win! Democracy fallen!” and someone jokes that the Balsanos are “hardened criminals”. But they appear benign, even magical in the case of Ray, who resembles an extra from Goodfellas. How he arrived at the arrangement by which he supplies teenage Ricky with what seems to be an ongoing novel, issued chapter by cliffhanging chapter, remains obscure, like much backstory here. But when its contents are finally read aloud, it proves hauntingly lyrical. Maybe Ray is a supreme and underrated talent. With Taormina, however, there’s no maybe about it.

► Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point arrives in UK cinemas 15 November.