Holidate (2020)

Netflix released Holidate in the autumn of 2020, and it performs the labor of a holiday romantic comedy with the diligence of a mall Santa working a double shift. Emma Roberts plays Sloane, a workaholic who dreads the calendar because every family gathering becomes a referendum on her singleness. She strikes a pact with Jackson, an Australian golfer played by Luke Bracey, to serve as each other's platonic escort through the year's holidays. The arrangement proceeds through Valentine's Day, the Fourth of July, Halloween and Thanksgiving with the mechanical reliability of a seasonal aisle reset.

The film carries a modest charge of progressive sensibility in two places. Sloane bristles at the family expectation that a woman must be paired to be complete, and she is written as financially self-sufficient and professionally serious. The resolution, however, folds her neatly into the conventional coupling the genre demands, so the friction is felt and then dissolved. The supporting ensemble includes Black, South Asian and East Asian performers in roles that carry no weight beyond their function in the plot. Nobody remarks on any of it. The casting is a quiet gesture, not a statement.

Beyond those two items, the cupboard is bare. There is no queer presence, no environmental concern, no economic critique of the glossy consumption on display. The film moves through malls and gift exchanges without a whisper of discomfort about any of it. Bodies are conventional and unexamined. Neurodivergence does not appear. History is not invoked, so it cannot be revised. The sermon count sits near zero, which is the film's most defensible quality; the jokes arrive, land or miss, and the credits roll. As a cultural document it is inert, and as a romantic comedy it is adequate in the way a reheated plate of leftovers is adequate. The classification is straightforward and the file can be closed.