Movie reviews: Hollywood and Indie, specializing in independent comedies, dramas, thrillers and romance.
Friday, November 21, 2025
The Christmas Writer: Movie Review
Christmas-y, queer, and uneven around the edges.
As gay Christmas romances start to become more common, it also means we can probably start to become a little more critical. The Christmas Writer is unpolished. It hits on many of the traditional Christmas rom-com beats but does so from a new angle and a fresh voice, but also with unflattering lighting, bad acting, and choppy editing.
2025
Directed by: Christin Baker
Screenplay by: Christin Baker, Katie I. Williams
Starring: Shelby Allison Brown, Callie Bussell
I know this movie will have its audience as the queer romance crowd have been pretty vocal about their lack of Christmas options, but at the same time that audience will need to be forgiving of the amateur production and soap opera-like appearance at times. The production issues make the movie hard to get into which keeps the emotion and romance at bay.
But with that negativity out of the way, the lead character is great. A down-to-Earth and much needed breath of fresh air as far as holiday heroines go. She’s not as extreme or one-dimensional as Hallmark tends to go, she just comes across as a natural woman.
Noel (Shelby Allison Brown) is a successful novelist, successful in one specific genre: gay Christmas love stories. They used to come naturally to her, her mother loved Christmas and was a writing teacher at the local college; until this year. Her first Christmas without her mother and Noel now has writer’s block.
To pass the time she goes back to her hometown, stays with her grandmother and volunteers as a judge at the bookstore’s Christmas story idea contest. Seems like a bad idea to me: judging other people’s ideas while you can’t come up with any of your own. But the movie is more about falling in love with the bookstore’s lesbian owner.
What I like about queer romances in general and this one in particular is that the lead characters tend to have real conversations. Noel and Callie talk about coming out as gay and even though they are close in age, Noel is a few years older and she’s surprised by how much easier it was for Callie. They talk about what specifically Callie likes about the country, how the college has changed the small town for the better, to make it more progressive, but how it still has all the features and heart of a small town. By the end of the movie, they have already talked about and worked out their differences so you know the romance is real.
There are two main obstacles, one makes no sense: Noel is a writer and therefore needs to live in the city. I’m sorry, but no, an already famous writer is the one profession that can literally be done anywhere, her arguments otherwise make no sense. The second one you can see coming, but that’s common for the genre all romances apparently need a misunderstanding.
The Christmas Writer is an unpolished production with a lot of awkward moments, but it also features a lead character that is natural and fresh and gay, exactly what this genre needs more of.
