THE ADVENT CALENDAR: A Holiday Horror Eclipsed By Its Predecessors

Less of a holiday horror film and more of a supernatural thriller involving a mysterious wooden advent calendar that vaguely works like Sadako’s dreaded tape from Ringu, writer/director Patrick Ridremont’s The Advent Calendar is an intriguing but ultimately middling film that doesn’t satisfy in the end.

There is a lot of promise in The Advent Calendar, like the psychological trauma of losing one’s ability to walk or choosing between your deepest desires and the lives of those around you who you both love and resent, but the film is weighed down by bloated concepts and throwaway lines that suggest something else is going on, when there’s no reason to believe that’s a possibility.

“Arise & Walk”

The Advent Calendar is about a woman named Eva who has paraplegia and the increasingly disturbing things she will do in order to walk again by way of a cursed advent calendar. We learn that she was once a ballet dancer before a car accident caused by her best friend, Sophie, who wasn’t severely injured from the crash. On December 3^rd, Eva’s birthday, Sophie travels from Germany to bring her an antique wooden advent calendar with a carving on that back that says “Dump it and I’ll kill you” in German, a message that makes both women laugh at its absurdity. Eva opens the tiny wooden doors for the first three days and finds different types of candies with cryptic biblical messages, her father’s favorite candy. She also learns the rest of the “rules” for the calendar.

Later, after Sophie has left, Eva eats the candy that is a favorite of her father, a man with severe dementia who she hasn’t seen or spoken to in a long time thanks to her laughably wicked stepmother. After Eva takes a bite of the simple chocolate, she hears a strange sound coming from her landline phone, not exactly a ring but a sound, and answers it, hearing her father say, “Happy birthday” before the line goes dead.

From here, the film goes down a strange, convoluted, and confusing path that pulls from different horror movies for inspiration, though “inspiration” might just be a bit too generous. Eva’s life is suddenly crumbling around her but her every wish and desire is fulfilled; like wishing the man who sexually assaults her after a night out her would “drop dead” or a finding that a handsome man she meets in the park turns out to be exactly who she wants him to be. Her life goes from zero to one hundred in a matter of days, and she realizes that each candy causes something amazing or something horrifying to happen.

All the while, a creature that looks like a cross between Jason Voorhees, the Chatterer Cenobite from Hellraiser, and Pyramid Head from Silent Hill, with random numbers carved into its flesh (oh right! Because it’s the advent calendar priest-turned-demon, right!) either threatens Eva or pulls the strings that do her bidding after each candy is consumed. It’s a very interesting concept for a movie demon but it fails at terrifying or even stimulating any emotion – we’ve seen this kind of monster and this kind of story a hundred times before.

What’s puzzling about the film is how limited the scope of it is – there are seemingly no real consequences for the demon’s little advent calendar game and, despite all of the sacrifices that Eva must make in order to walk again, there is no sense of urgency from the outside world, making what could be a prolific concept into a tired wash – why should the audience care about what’s happening if there’s no real effect? Are we to believe that Eva’s desires are so sharp that the film is echoing her priorities by having nobody care much that these strange things are happening?

In this way, the true horror could be the audience’s journey with Eva as she sinks lower and lower, revealing just how desperate she is to walk again. But, in the end, the film’s big revelation deflates everything. While the film has no qualms taking major plot points from better films like the aforementioned Ringu or It Follows – where there must be a continuation of the demon’s curse – it hinders itself of any real staying power by suggesting the curse to be transitory.

Conclusion: The Advent Calendar

While Eugénie Derouand‘s performance as Eva is both believable and heartbreaking as she illustrates a woman longing for her old untrammeled life, her talents and vulnerability are taken for granted by the film. In the end,  The Advent Calendar is a barely average film with some solid scenes and a thought-provoking concept, but there’s just not enough thrills or originality to keep this holiday thriller above water.

What are your thoughts on The Advent Calendar? Let us know in the comments below!

The Advent Calendar premieres exclusively on Shudder, Thursday, December 2.

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