The Knight Before Christmas (2019)

A medieval English knight is flung forward to the present day, where he is struck by a car, diagnosed with amnesia by a local officer, and installed in a stranger's guest house. That is the entire engine of The Knight Before Christmas, a 2019 holiday romance that approaches its own absurd premise with the placid confidence of a film that has no intention of arguing with anybody about anything. Sir Cole marvels at radios and Alexa. He catches a pickpocket. He rescues two children from a frozen lake. The narrative asks no questions of the modern world and receives no answers worth reporting.

Brooke, his host, teaches high school science and has sworn off love after being left by a previous partner. The film notes this and then sets about curing her, which places it squarely in the tradition of holiday courtships where a woman's stated independence is a symptom to be resolved by the closing credits. No argument attaches to her career. No thesis about her worth is advanced. The plot simply requires her to be sad and then not sad. The knight's disorientation is played for gentle comedy, never as a condition to be understood or accommodated, and the crone's unexplained magic does all the heavy lifting that character development might otherwise have done.

The cast is led by Vanessa Hudgens and filled out with agreeable white faces, alongside a few supporting players of color who appear without the film ever acknowledging them as such. Race goes unmentioned. So do class, climate, and every other subject on which a movie might be tempted to lecture. That leaves a mug of cocoa with a medallion in it: warm, harmless, and entirely without a message. The knight gets the girl. Nobody learns anything, least of all the audience, and the film seems content to leave it that way.