This is Reel One Entertainment Christmas 2023 season TV movie. It's probably their lowest budget Christmas one. Actually, their whole Christmas 2023 season is a really low budget. They clearly cut down budget from the 2022 season, but for some reason(s) quality went up. Technically is fine except one thing which plagues so many their TV movie in the last two years - overusage of stock footage. Just cut it down...
I'm not the fan of Brittany Underwood, both as actress and director, but I think she was mostly passable - she definitely improved as the movie goes. Her lead partner, Sean Yves Lessard, who looks like discount Ezra Miller but is better than him, was actually surprisingly well. Marnie Mahannah who played Brittany's younger sister deserves lead role. She's better than the vast majority of new female leads in ROE TV movies. The rest of the cast is barely in.
The biggest failure is writing. I would say director did the best what could be done with that Hallmarkish Christmas cookie cutter screenplay. I mean, there is some genuine good writing like for example I think that the backstory of the "French" guy was actually really good, and I didn't expect it. Act I is done well, too. Sadly, the vast majority is full of you already saw it so many times in Hallmark TV movies (Act II), but it's even worse because of the abovementioned really low budget. I didn't count but I think close to the half of dares are done off the screen because shooting them would prolong movie (but they could cut off stock footage to compensate) and would cost (a lot of) money which is I guess much serious issue. In some scenes movie was just a bit of too much childish. And what's up lately with ROE movies where the lead actress has some strange name - this time is Elara. Seriously, just why?!
Overall, it's not a bad movie or a train wreck like the most ROE Christmas TV movies in 2022 season, but unfortunately mostly copy/paste Hallmark script dragged it down into watch it once and forget category.
And obligatory don't watch trailer (for some reasons here is only posted shortened version) as it's the ROE one and for some unknown reason(s) it shows whole movie compressed.
