Last Christmas

The Literal Heart of the Holidays

I still can’t decide whether the central twist of *Last Christmas* is deranged brilliance or a spectacular misfire. Maybe it’s both. Once it clicks that Emma Thompson and Bryony Kimmings built an entire screenplay around taking George Michael’s holiday anthem at face value, you’re either going to burst out laughing or just give in and accept the madness. I did the second. We all know the usual holiday rom-com setup: a jaded city person gets dragged toward the spirit of Christmas by some oddball charmer. Here, though, the oddity is medical. The charmer is dead. And the heart he gave her is literally the one beating in her chest.



Paul Feig usually works in a messier, louder register, with women who are profane, chaotic, and gloriously out of control in films like *Bridesmaids* and *Spy*. Watching him make a glossy London Christmas romance is a little like seeing a punk pick up a glockenspiel. It’s charming, but you keep waiting for somebody to break it. He tries to anchor all that holiday sparkle in something harsher, setting the film in a post-Brexit London where xenophobia and homelessness sit right beside the lights on Regent Street. It’s a shaky blend. The political material can feel tacked on, and critics at *The Movie Guys* weren’t wrong to call it "a wannabe Love Actually" that keeps things a bit too neat. Still, Feig gives the city texture. The streets gleam with rain. The cold looks mean.



Whether the whole movie works probably comes down to that reveal in the apartment. Kate (Emilia Clarke) finally understands that Tom (Henry Golding) isn’t just some mysterious drifter who won’t carry a phone. She’s standing in an empty flat, and the slow camera movement makes the truth land hard: the man she’s been falling for died a year ago. The light changes just enough to drain away the cozy Christmas glow and leave something colder behind. Golding’s permanently luminous smile stops reading as romantic and starts to feel ghostly. Feig keeps the camera tight on Clarke as the realization wrecks her posture completely. In that moment the rom-com shell falls away, and what’s left is a grief movie dressed as an elf.



What gets the film through its own ridiculousness is Clarke’s deeply physical performance. She doesn’t just seem ill; she seems depleted. She shuffles, folds in on herself, keeps her shoulders hunched up near her ears like she’s trying to disappear inside her own body. Knowing her off-screen history makes that hard to shrug off. Clarke survived two major brain aneurysms in her twenties, at the height of her *Game of Thrones* fame, and carried serious trauma out of it. So when Kate says she feels like half a person after the hospital, it doesn’t play like an actor reaching for a feeling. It plays like recognition. Like somebody who knows what it is to feel your own body turn alien and frightening. It’s an exposed, vulnerable piece of work tucked inside a movie that mostly wants to sell you on the soundtrack. Whether that mismatch is a problem or the whole point depends on how much generosity you’re willing to give a story this determined to patch its heroine back together.