Falling for Christmas (2022)

Falling for Christmas arrives with the confidence of a film that knows precisely which supermarket aisle will carry it. Lindsay Lohan plays Sierra Belmont, a hotel heiress with a job title invented by her father and no actual duties, who tumbles off a mountain, loses her memory, and lands in the care of a widowed lodge owner and his precocious daughter. The amnesia is convenient. The lodge is failing. The snow is decorative. We have seen this before, and the film knows we have seen this before, which is its only real defense.

The casting is heritage Hollywood. Lohan returns on a wave of personal narrative, and the production leans on that familiarity instead of reaching for any broader representation. Its feminism is the older, gentler kind: a woman declines the corporate path her father paved and chooses to find herself, which is a self-discovery arc and not an argument. The economics receive a light dusting of grievance. A small business is squeezed, a wealthy man neglects it, and the wealthy class eventually rescues it with an investment, which is less an indictment of capital than a plea for nicer capital.

Elsewhere the ledger is bare. There is no LGBTQ presence, no engagement with racial dynamics, no environmental conscience behind the picturesque peaks, no challenge to conventional beauty standards, no neurodivergent characters, and no attempt to revise a single historical fact, there being no history on offer. The sermon count sits near zero. This is a film that wants to be liked and has no interest in being right about anything. It is a marshmallow, and it knows it is a marshmallow, and there is a kind of honesty in that.