Melt My Heart This Christmas: Movie Review

Generic romance, insufferable character.

It’s always hit or miss when Hallmark takes on a niche subject and turns it into their typical romance. Melt My Heart This Christmas is an unfortunate miss when they take the world of glass blowing and set a romance around an awful caricature of an evil boss. Ruining a movie with just one character is hard to do, and not helped by having no real details.		2025 Directed by: Amy Force Screenplay by: Ansley Gordon Starring: Laura Vandervoort, Stephen Huszar
Holly (Laura Vandervoot) is an amateur glass-blower, who now works for a new company, and is trying to get her glass ornaments on display at a Christmas glass festival. She does not get along with the festival organizer Jack (Stephen Huszar). As a way to appease to Jack, Holly agrees to work as an assistant for the festival’s big headliner, Bianca Bonhomme (Jennifer Wighorn), a supposedly world-renowned, semi-retired glass artist, whose assistant just quit so she’s threatening to withdraw from the festival because she’s just that horrible of a person. The first third of the movie is Bianca pulling a poor-man’s performance of Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestley from The Devil Wears Prada. Not a compliment. This is an unfunny, one-dimensional, insufferable character. The romance between Jack and Holly could be good, but it plays second fiddle to Bianca’s hostility towards Holly. They duo spend a lot of time together, but it’s all pretty non-descript. A generic romance to go with a generic movie. I often say the key to Hallmark’s niche movies is when they get the details right. When specific events or references are all real. They don’t get the details wrong here, but they also don’t have any details. Everything about the movie - the festival, the glass-blowing, the location – are all generic and don’t offer any specificity to be right or wrong, or also interesting. While we don’t see much of the glass blowing, the little we do see is interesting and gorgeous. The movie is also nicely photographed and produced. Most scenes take place at the festival Christmas market which provide a lovely background (even if it is on the too Hallmark-y side and less of the reality side). Melt My Heart This Christmas was my most anticipated for the season. Glass blowing, Christmas, and romance are perfectly complementary themes, and set in front of this background? Beautiful. Instead, it’s the most generic version of that movie with an insufferable character making this too hard to get into. Jack has a line in this movie that says, "The key to art is authenticity." This movie does not feel very authentic.

Want a different Christmas movie or just more holiday-themed movies? Holiday Movies