Le calendrier [The Advent Calendar] (2021)

It's a bit reductive to describe this French horror movie as being about a killer advent calendar, but if anyone needs that for some kind of yuletide horror bingo card, by all means check it off. What I found most interesting about the film is its choice of subgenres and references to establish the rules and lore around the deadly box. I should caution those are minor spoilers, so read the next paragraph at your own risk.

The movie's premise is ultimately revealed to be a mix of "deal-with-the-devil" and time travel elements, with the stipulation neither are explicit. The time travel, in particular, won't register as part of that subgenre to anyone who hasn't spent an abnormal amount of time considering that genre. As for the "deal-with-the-devil" thing... it's not entirely clear the monster at the center of this is a demon, at all. You could argue it's actually an angel, of the Old Testament variety. And Eva, the movie's heroine, doesn't actually make a deal with it.

Eva is paraplegic, and she's given a strange, antique advent calendar as a gift. The contraption is ornate, with clockwork mechanism and a few rules. First, is that if you eat one of the candies, you'll need to eat them all (though there seems to be some issues with the translation here, as the box subsequently requires them to be consumed or activated, not eaten by Eva specifically). Rule two is that all rules must be respected until the last door is opened on Christmas Eve. And number three is that you're not allowed to attempt to dispose of the calendar. Break any of the rules, and the penalty is the same: it'll kill you.

Naturally, Eva assumes the rules are meant as a joke, as no one's informed her she's in a horror movie. It takes a while for her to realize otherwise, because the rules don't always behave the way you expect, nor is the calendar (or entity driving it) motivated by what we assume.

First, the calendar is surprisingly relaxed about that first rule. The candies must be eaten, but not all by the primary user and not necessarily one each day. Each door won't open until midnight, but there doesn't seem to be a hard deadline after that. Particularly at the start, she delays a few for various reasons.

The candies (or in some cases toys or other objects) have effects or purposes. Some of these kill individuals who have wronged Eva (a man who sexually assaulted her is killed in a car crash after Eva's dog chews up a toy car). Others demand sacrifices of her friends and family, initially by killing them itself, then eventually pressuring her to perform the deed.

But at the same time it's also rewarding her in various ways: one candy temporarily returns the mind of her father suffering from Alzheimer's, another functions as a love potion on a guy she likes, and a third kind (given over the course of several days) returns the use of her legs.

You can see how the deal with the devil parallels in this give and take, with one notable caveat: until the very end of the movie (more on this in a moment), Eva never made a deal with anything. Technically, she agreed to the rules when she ate the first piece of candy, but this feels more like her being snared by an unfair trap. And from that point on, she really doesn't have much agency. She makes a couple minor choices, such as slipping the guy she likes the chocolate, but this is before she has any real reason to suspect there's anything supernatural at play. After that, she's kind of held hostage: she'll be killed if she doesn't comply.

Towards the end, things get more complicated. After things have escalated (she's forced to sacrifice her dog, the guy she likes was drowned trying to destroy the box, and her friends were brutally killed), she locates a message in the form of a painting made by the previous user. She tracks him down and discovers he has no memory of the object, family members depicted as being sacrificed are fine, and - moreover - he's been blind for five years.

This leads to her realizing that the 24th piece of candy will undo everything, rewinding time and removing the object from her possession. All she has to do is stay alive until then, follow the rules, and all the sacrifices will be undone, along with the gifts.

At this point, she takes a bit of a dark turn. When the calendar calls on her to kill a woman she detests using a sort of voodoo doll, Eva isn't merciful in her approach. Likewise, when it calls on her to sacrifice her father, she decides to kill her sadistic mother-in-law as well, just for fun. She's living in a tangent timeline that she's destined to forget, so there's no need to adhere to her usual moral code.

As the clock approaches midnight of December 24th, Eva records a video of her warning whoever ends up with the calendar next to follow the rules. She also dances on the video, knowing it will be the last time she does so.

Then... things take a bit of a turn when a loophole in rule 2 is pointed out to her. The rules apply until the last door opens, revealing the candy that will undo everything. However, once that's occurred, it's up to her whether or not she eats it. To prove this, the guy she's with who realized this tosses the calendar off a rooftop, demonstrating there are no repercussions for doing so. She can simply decide not to eat the last piece, in which case she'll retain the use of her legs (as well as a sizable amount of money the calendar magicked up for her in this timeline), but the loved ones she lost will be gone forever.

She stares at the candy and screams in existential horror. We're shown a brief sequence a year later when a panicked man with the phone she'd used to record the video arrives at her house looking for answers, but we're not shown Eva and thus not told what she chose.

For what it's worth, I like this choice here. It's less a "it doesn't matter" than an acknowledgement the viewer is aware either choice is tragic and horrific. Either way, she sacrificed everything, whether she knows it or not.

It's the rest of the movie I'm more mixed on. While there are some cool ideas and visuals (the monstrous entity is particularly impressive, in a grotesque way), the whole thing feels lacking in much of a point. The premise lacks much applicability as a metaphor, and there's no clear statement being made, or at least none I could discern (French viewers better versed in cultural references I might be glossing over: feel free to enlighten me in the comments).

To the extent it's about something, it seems to be sacrifice - both Eva's father and friend encourage her to sacrifice them to regain the use of her legs, and the final choice is between sacrificing others and oneself. While that makes for a neat idea, I'm not sure it's developed sufficiently to have much of an impact: the tone just isn't serious enough for us to take it to heart. At the same time, the tone also isn't quite funny enough for this to work as a campy, horror/comedy. I think this would have worked better if it had committed in one way or the other, rather than falling in the middle.

From a holiday standpoint, here's a great deal here we could explore, starting with time travel (that is, after all, one of my favorite yuletide subjects). The premise is in many ways an inversion of the Ghost of Christmas Future from A Christmas Carol (or alternatively the Pottersville tangent universe in It's a Wonderful Life). In those cases, dark timelines were explored to teach the protagonist a lesson, then return them to set things right. This entire movie is essentially about a similar tangent universe, only here the main character is being offered the thing she desires most. The darkest timeline is both the most awful and most understandably appealing: the horror comes from the choice itself and our own lingering doubt what we'd do in her place.

I should also note there's another brief sequence involving temporal displacement, when Eva witnesses the man she has a crush on about to make the mistake that will get him killed. She's actually able to scratch a message to him backwards on a mirror, which appears on the calendar.

Whatever the entity here is, it seems intrinsically linked to both the holidays and the passage of time (I mean, we are talking about an advent calendar), which may tie this to the winter solstice, when time (at least in a sense) seems to slow down and eventually reverse course as the days go from growing shorter and shorter to longer and longer. Was that connection intentional here? Was it intentional in A Christmas Carol? I've got no clue, but I wanted to mention it.

Speaking of things worth mentioning... this also resembles Christmas ghost stories and related folklore tied to holiday tradition. The folklore is particularly notable, as the advent calendar was acquired in Munich, which seems to be invoked as a source of old legends and stories. We're never really given much depth on what the entity is or what its purpose is. You could view it as a corrupting, demonic force, or even as being strangely benevolent, albeit warped (after all, it's ultimately offering a choice under constraints we don't understand). It's also surprisingly gentle with Eva, and the majority of those it kills are people who wronged her.

In a lot of ways, I'm reminded of The Box: I wouldn't be at all surprised if that was one of the inspirations for this movie. In addition to superficial similarities between the respective titular objects, there are similar ideas being explored around sacrifice and impossible choices, and the two movies share similar tones. Unfortunately, they share a few problems, as well, both with those tones and with an undercurrent of ableism.

I think The Advent Calendar does a little better on this front than The Box, which seemed to endorse the idea that a disabled life is somehow not worth living. The Advent Calendar, to its credit, portrays Eva as perfectly capable. Further, it does a good job highlighting the kinds of discrimination she experiences. However, considering the movie is fixated on Eva's trauma at losing the use of her legs, I question the ethics of an ending that doesn't allow her peace (or even portray this as an acceptable state of being). From a storytelling perspective, this feels like it's setting up the idea she wants to recover the use of her legs but needs to learn to accept herself as she is. Resolving the movie without reconciling or even acknowledging this dynamic risks implying that it's impossible she could ever find happiness as a paraplegic. I don't think that's what the filmmakers were trying to say - again, the movie comes off as sympathetic - but intent is less important than implication.

I realize I'm both applauding and criticizing the ending, but if a movie can end ambiguously I can review it the same way. After all, there's more than one perspective worth considering here. That same ambiguity defines my feelings towards the movie as a whole - I really like a lot of the ideas it's playing with, but I found aspects of the execution frustrating. And while it didn't bother me all that much, I expect most horror fans will be similarly frustrated that this isn't all that scary. The monster (or angel or demon or...) looks good, and some of the intricate time travel stuff is fun to explore, but given how many fantastic holiday horror flicks have come out in recent years, there's no reason to prioritize this one.