Our Little Secret

The Holiday Rom-Com as Comfort Food—With a Side of Regret

I’ll admit it: I went into Our Little Secret expecting a lump of coal. Not because I have anything against Lindsay Lohan—quite the opposite, actually. Her return to the screen after years away has been one of the more unexpected and oddly heartening stories in recent Hollywood memory. But the holiday rom-com is a genre that has been strip-mined to the point of exhaustion. The forced proximity, the quirky family dynamics, the inevitable snowfall that melts just in time for a kiss—it’s all so familiar it might as well come with a barcode. And yet. There’s something about Our Little Secret that lingers, not because it reinvents the wheel, but because it leans so hard into its own absurdity that it circles back around to being kind of charming.

The film follows Avery (Lohan) and Logan (Ian Harding), two exes who discover their current partners are siblings and are forced to spend Christmas together while pretending they barely know each other. The premise is pure rom-com contrivance, the kind of setup that requires you to suspend disbelief before the opening credits even finish rolling. But here’s the thing: Our Little Secret doesn’t just ask for your suspension of disbelief. It demands it, then pokes at it, then drapes it in tinsel and forces it to sing a karaoke version of “Celebration” in front of a church full of people. And somehow, that audacity is what makes the film work—or at least, what makes it interesting.



The opening sequence is a masterclass in what not to do if you’re trying to ground a story in reality. Over a montage of Avery and Logan’s past relationship, we’re treated to a rapid-fire recap of the decade since their breakup, complete with random pop-culture milestones (the Ice Bucket Challenge, the dress that broke the internet, the Suez Canal boat) that feel like they were pulled from a BuzzFeed quiz. It’s jarring, tonally inconsistent, and—here’s the kicker—completely intentional. The film isn’t interested in realism. It’s interested in the idea of two people who are so determined to move on from each other that they’ve rewritten their own history, only to be forced to confront it in the most public way possible. The montage isn’t just lazy exposition; it’s a metaphor for the way we curate our pasts, sanding down the rough edges until they fit neatly into the story we tell ourselves.

That’s the film’s most interesting idea, and it’s one that Our Little Secret returns to again and again, even if it doesn’t always know what to do with it. The central tension isn’t just that Avery and Logan have to pretend they’re strangers—it’s that they’ve spent years pretending to themselves that their relationship didn’t matter. The holiday setting, with its emphasis on family, tradition, and performative cheer, only heightens the irony. Christmas is the one time of year when we’re all supposed to be our best selves, but it’s also the time when our carefully constructed facades are most likely to crack. The film leans into this, particularly in a scene where Avery, after consuming a THC gummy (because of course she does), delivers an increasingly unhinged speech at a church holiday pageant that devolves into an impromptu group rendition of Kool & The Gang’s “Celebration.” It’s a moment that could have been cringe-inducing, but Lohan sells it with such unselfconscious commitment that it becomes weirdly transcendent. For a few minutes, the film stops pretending to be a rom-com and just lets its characters be messy, awkward humans. It’s the closest Our Little Secret comes to feeling real.