I’m on day nine now of my Christmas films review series. Taking a quick break from Netflix, this time I popped over to Amazon Prime to see whether their big Christmas movie for 2025 – Oh What Fun – was truly as bad as everyone said. And I can confirm that yea, it kind of is.
Oh What Fun is one of those Christmas films that clearly set out to say something important about motherhood, emotional labour and being quietly taken for granted, and then got distracted halfway through by stupid subplots, a weird daytime TV contest and Michelle Pfeiffer’s self-pitying main character.
Pfeiffer plays Claire, a Texas grandmother with a vast boomer house and fully grown children, who is somehow treated as the sole load-bearing wall of Christmas. She is putting all her efforts into hosting and flapping, while also unhealthily invested in winning the desperately stupid Zazzy Timms Mum of the Year Contest, which almost certainly was not designed for mothers of adults who show up once a year at Christmas. This is hardly the trenches of motherhood. Let’s be real.
Claire – who narrates the whole thing so we don’t have to work out the plot for ourselves – is, from minute one, profoundly grumpy.
This is not helped by the fact that Michelle Pfeiffer appears to be having a genuinely difficult time emoting. She looks fantastic, obviously. She has clearly put the work in and I would be absolutely stoked to look anything like her at 47, let alone sixty-fucking-seven. But when the script asks her to cry, her forehead simply refuses to participate. It’s giving Brooke Shields in A Castle for Christmas. The performance suggests emotion in theory, but the face remains diplomatically neutral.
The family dynamics are exactly what you’d expect from a Christmas romcom (side note: there really is not a single moment I would label as comedic in this film and I will laugh at anything). We’ve got grown children with unresolved issues; a husband who seems fine but has never wrapped a present in his life (and, although allowed to age facially, has suspiciously un-grey hair for a pensioner); a son with a guitar and a broken heart; and two daughters; one with children and a simmering resentment about doing Christmas her mother’s way (fair, to be honest), and one with a complicated love life (i.e. she’s a bit of a slag. Power to her).
There is also a long-running rivalry with the perfect Asian neighbours, primarily expressed through passive aggression and competitive candle-gifting.
Predictably, Claire reaches her breaking point.
When the family pull a reverse Home Alone and forget to take mum to the Christmas show she planned for them (complete with hot Santa, because every Christmas film needs a six-pack), she does not follow them in her car and attempt to laugh it off. Oh no. She does what many mothers fantasise about but never actually do: she packs a bag and leaves.
She ignores their calls, ends up in a motel, shares a room with a delivery driver who likes whale noises, sleeps in her car, gets towed, buys another car, drives to California and – while her family are busy incompetently fucking up Christmas Day without her – accidentally becomes the face of overlooked motherhood on national television.
The problem is that the film itself doesn’t seem entirely sure what story it’s telling.
Is it about the invisible labour of mums? Maternal burnout? Suburban competitiveness? Later-life validation? A descent into candle-related madness? All of the above, apparently, but not quite enough of any one thing to really land. Claire’s crisis is presented as profound, but it’s hard to fully engage when her biggest struggle appears to be hosting Christmas in a massive house, with all her family around her, while steadfastly refusing to communicate.
There are so many side plots drifting in and out without consequence; romantic misunderstandings, emo musical interludes, lesbian drama, neighbourly tension, a Romeo-and-Juliet subplot my 12-year-old spotted a mile off, and a grandfather failing to build a doll’s house because LOL he is incompetent. Yet somehow, halfway through, it still feels like nothing much has happened. Possibly because we’ve all spent too long staring at Michelle Pfeiffer’s forehead wondering if it can move.
I LOVE YOU MICHELLE. THIS IS NOT PERSONAL. I PROMISE. I just miss when women were allowed to age.
Eventually, everyone learns something.
Probably. Claire realises she deserves appreciation. The family realises she exists. Eva Longoria turns up as Zazzy Timms (which may be the stupidest fucking name I’ve encountered in a Christmas film to date) to explain motherhood to an audience of improbably available mums on Christmas Day.
There is reconciliation. There is champagne. There is a final hot tub scene that Michelle Pfeiffer has very obviously earned contractually; and may I remind you that this goddess is sixty-seven.
What Oh What Fun gets right is the core truth: Christmas does – not always, but often – happen because mums make it happen, and everyone else simply turns up expecting presents, fun and food.
What it gets wrong is believing that a neat speech on daytime TV can resolve decades of gendered emotional labour, or that a woman shoplifting a three-wick candle should trigger a full security response and car chase.
Rating: 4/10. It was not, in fact, fun.
Not terrible. Not great. Deeply average, or slightly below. The kind of film you half-watch while wondering what you would do if you snapped and drove off on Christmas Eve.
If you enjoyed this and you’re feeling generous, you can buy me a cup of tea or a glass of wine – or donate to my houseplant addiction fund – here.
You can also see my Amazon wish list here.