Jingle Bell Heist

The Art of the Festive Steal

I have a pretty sour baseline when it comes to streaming holiday movies. You know the species: fake snow drifting like potato flakes, emotional stakes no heavier than overbaked cookies, everything assembled to murmur in the background while wrapping paper piles up. So when I hit play on Michael Fimognari’s *Jingle Bell Heist*, my expectations were scraping the floor. The pleasant surprise is that once the bar is that low, even a modest leap can feel exhilarating.

Fimognari has never been a visual nonentity. Before directing the *To All the Boys* sequels, he was the cinematographer on Mike Flanagan projects like *Doctor Sleep* and *The Fall of the House of Usher*, and he knows how to shape a space. In this movie, a wealthy London department store glows with a warm, slightly decadent palette that almost tips into *Eyes Wide Shut* territory. Right away, it tells you this isn’t pure Hallmark mush. The setup is cheerfully odd: Sophia (Olivia Holt), a store employee who lifts wallets from rude customers to cover her mother’s medical bills, gets pulled into a heist by Nick (Connor Swindells), a tech contractor whom the store’s owner, Maxwell Sterling (Peter Serafinowicz), framed for theft.



The movie absolutely wobbles. Abby McDonald and Amy Reed’s script keeps tangling itself in extra reversals and backup plans until the heist starts feeling more complicated than clever. At one point Sophia’s grandfather turns out to have been a magician, which the film uses as a shrugging excuse for her sleight-of-hand ability. That’s the sort of shortcut that makes you groan into your tea. Benjamin Lee at *The Guardian* described it as a film that "has just enough to give it the edge of its anaemic peers," which feels dead-on and faintly insulting in the right way.

Still, I found myself going along because the cast is having such a good time steering through the mess. There’s a mid-film stretch that won me over completely. Nick needs a keycard, which means charming Sterling’s predatory wife Cynthia, played by Lucy Punch with unnerving comic precision, at a holiday gala. Sophia feeds him lines through an earpiece. It’s an old routine, but Fimognari stages it with a frantic screwball bounce. Swindells hunches inward as he recites Sophia’s polished dialogue, shoulders curling tighter every time Cynthia leans closer. You can practically see panic humming in his jaw. It’s terrific physical comedy.



Swindells ends up grounding the movie. After *Sex Education*, he clearly knows how to play a man whose confidence is more costume than reality. Nick doesn’t just register as funny; he feels worn thin by a system designed to cushion someone like Sterling and grind up someone like him. Holt, meanwhile, works in a brisker key, all quick timing and bright edges. Their chemistry isn’t the grand, combustible kind, but the movie doesn’t really need that. What it gets instead is a tired, practical alliance that slowly relaxes into something charming.



I still wouldn’t call *Jingle Bell Heist* a fully satisfying romance or a fully satisfying caper. It spends most of its runtime wobbling between those two identities. Serafinowicz, funny as he can be elsewhere, is left stranded with a villain too broad to feel like a real danger. And yet I’m weirdly fond of a Christmas movie that swaps small-town-bakery sentiment for class resentment and breaking into vaults. Disposable? Sure. But it has some actual texture. Even in a holiday movie, a little friction goes a long way.