Falling for Christmas review: Lindsay Lohan and the very unconvincing brain injury

Falling for Christmas was Netflix’s 2022 festive offering (before LiLo went heavy on the Botox) built around a single, unhinged premise: what if a very rich woman fell off a mountain, bumped her head, forgot who she was, and became nice.

If the NHS could replicate this, we could sort half the country out by February.

We begin with Lindsay Lohan waking up in obscene luxury.

She is sipping champagne at breakfast while a glam squad applies her make-up like she’s about to host the Oscars. Outside, it is aggressively Christmassy. This is because she is Sierra Belmont, daughter of a ski resort tycoon, and dressed like a pink Power Ranger.

She is engaged to Tad, an influencer. This is important because it explains everything about Tad. He is vapid, annoying, deeply uninterested in joy, and allergic to Christmas music. He exists purely to be dumped later with minimal emotional fallout, which is convenient because no one cares about him.

Sierra does not ski, which is odd given she is the heiress to a ski resort, but fine. I’ve watched snowmen come to life and carpenters become strippers, I can believe this for 90 minutes. Tad proposes on top of a mountain with a tacky ring that does not fit.

Meanwhile, in a different narrative lane entirely, Jake exists.

Jake is earnest. Jake is wholesome. Jake has nice hair on both his head and his face and looks a bit like he’d be at home singing in a 90s boyband. Jake owns a failing ski lodge called North Star in a small town called Summit Springs. Jake is, sadly, a widowed dad. Jake is described by everyone, repeatedly, as A Very Good Guy.

There is also a creepy Father Christmas man knocking about, Jake’s child, Avy, and her maternal grandma.

Avy makes a Christmas wish and puts it on the tree.

Mere moments later Sierra falls off a cliff and headbutts a tree at speed. Honestly, it looks like a catastrophic head injury. She should be dead, or at the very least unrecognisable and unable to string a sentence together. Instead, she loses her memory and nothing else. No blood loss, no broken bones, not even slurred speech or coordination issues. Just a factory reset on her personality.

Jake finds her unconscious in the snow and takes her to hospital. The sheriff can’t identify her, her dad has gone away for the holidays, and Tad is missing somewhere on the mountain, so there’s no one to report her missing.

Jake offers to take Sierra back to his lodge. This is, objectively, quite predatory. She agrees because hospital food is bad and he seems nice; what could go wrong?

At the lodge, she discovers normal life.

Her remote does not open the blinds in her top-spec hotel room, but puts on Netflix and ‘A Castle for Christmas‘. Quite rightly, she throws the remote at the screen; that film was shiiiit. She cannot make eggs, she cannot do laundry, she cannot put a fitted sheet on a bed (which honestly feels like the most relatable thing in the film). There is a fully decorated Christmas tree in her bedroom, which explains why the lodge is failing. This place is haemorrhaging electricity.

To everyone’s indifference, Tad eventually turns up alive, trudging through the snow with a bearded ice fisherman.

Sierra decides to call herself Sarah – why not? – befriends Avy, bonds over hair brushing, and remembers she was once a ginger child.

It’s all very wholesome; there is singing and gingerbread.

The town, Summit Springs, has a frankly suspicious decorating budget.

Sarah/Sierra suggests they hold a fundraiser because we must tick off Save Failing Small Business on the Christmas Film Bingo card. Jake says no because he is afraid of making new memories, due to his dead wife. He broods quietly and looks a bit like a bearded toddler.

Grandma roots for them. Avy roots for them. I reckon the audience do too, probably.

Jake and Sarah are getting closer.

Like, sexytime closer. The message at this point appears to be that the best way to find a wife is to locate a woman with amnesia at the side of the road and house her until she loves you.

Jake agrees to host a Christmas Eve party. Everyone donates money to save the lodge, which is not how business works. It is apparently being made a historic site, which also does not solve the long-term sustainability issue but never mind.

Mr Belmont, having arrived home to no Sierra, turns up with Tad who he bumped into at the sheriff’s office. Sierra is whisked back to the resort where she belongs, and there’s a Christmas Montage while Lindsay Lohan’s sister sings something Eurovision-adjacent.

But – oh!

Sierra has changed.

She makes her own pancakes. She refuses caviar. She declines a sparkly dress. Being poor for four days means she has been rehabilitated!

There is a press conference on Christmas Day, because capitalism never sleeps and journalists don’t have families I guess. Sierra name-checks the North Star resort, Tad hijacks it to announce their engagement, and Jake heroically switches off the TV. Avy is devastated because her Christmas wish was that her dad would have someone to love.

Jake somehow acquires an expensive sleigh he could not previously afford (Christmas miracle!) and races to the Belmont resort to declare his feelings. Meanwhile Sierra hands back the ugly ring, dumps Tad on Christmas Day, and he is absolutely fine because he will gain followers from this. He was also obviously gay the entire time, which the film seems to realise right at the end.

Phones ring off the hook at North Star.

It is saved! Sierra and Jake kiss by the Christmas tree. Avy beams. Everyone is happy.

And that’s it.

Falling for Christmas is not clever.

It is not particularly funny. It is nowhere near as sharp as Our Little Secret. But it is harmless, gently ridiculous and comfortably stupid. A soft-focus Lindsay Lohan comeback wrapped in knitwear and mild brain trauma. It did not ring my Christmas bells, but it didn’t make me want to throw anything at the television either, which after yesterday’s The Princess Switch feels like a huge win.

Would I watch it again? No.
Would I survive it again? Yes.
Would I recommend skiing without a helmet? Absolutely not.

Rating: 5.5/10. I didn’t hate it, but if you only have one festive Lindsay Lohan film this year, watch Our Little Secret instead.