White Reindeer

Synopsis: Real estate agent Suzanne Barrington (Anna Margaret Hollyman) is looking forward to Christmas and a post-Yuletide relocation to Hawaii with her loving husband, a television weather man. Everything goes pear-shaped however when she returns home to find that him shot dead by an intruder.

Writer-director Zach Clark’s film is a diverting little indie black comedy that is sustained largely by Anna Margaret Hollyman’s central performance as the grieving widow trying to get through life as best she can after her contentedly mundane happiness is shattered. This involves online binge-shopping, sex with strangers and generally hiding her pain behind a pleasant smile as she progresses from one ill-advised encounter to the next in search of, if not peace, then at least, temporary, oblivion.

Together Clark and Hollyman get the mixture of sadness, desperation and absurdity just right although the cross-currenting redemptive trajectory is based on a device which seems a little forced: at her husband’s wake his close friend tells Suzanne that the man she thought to be devoted to her had been having an affair with a lap dancer (Laura Lemar-Goldsborough). Why would he do this?  And particularly at that moment. Be that as it may, the story has to progress somehow and so Suzanne seeks her out and their relationship helps her on the path to recovery and an explanation of the film’s title.

Clark maintains a consistently low-key tone which never drops into the ironically dead-pan on the one hand, or over-does the off-beat on the other, but maintains a wryly humorous detachment, eventually achieving a resolution that neatly fits the agenda of being a Christmas tale for our secular, consumerist age.

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