CARNAGE FOR CHRISTMAS (2024)

Genre cinema rarely goes hand-in-hand with Christmas movies, at least not the Hallmark variety. That said, there’s something inherently exciting and funny about the premise of a film like Carnage for Christmas. This indie Australian production mashes up thrilling horror and gore with the spirit of Christmas, resulting in a unique queer holiday film.

Writer-director Alice Maio Mackay is an incredibly prolific young trans filmmaker from Australia. She celebrated her 19th birthday during the shoot of her fifth feature film, Carnage for Christmas. The film was screened primarily at festivals before becoming available to rent or buy on several streaming platforms like YouTube and Apple TV. She uses crowdfunding to fund her projects, which has allowed her to build a robust filmography at such a young age.

For Lola (Jeremy Moineau), a trans woman hosting a true-crime podcast and hoping for her big break in private investigation, the Christmas season is ripe with anxiety. She’s due to return to her hometown, which she left behind at sixteen to transition and start her new life in the big city. She wants to spend the holidays with her sister Danielle (Dominique Booth), who still lives there, even if her boyfriend Charlie (Zarif) disapproves. She steels herself for what she hopes will be a drama-free visit, but it turns sour almost immediately. Not only is she returning with a new name and gender identity, but she’s also returning as somewhat of a local celebrity; before doing true-crime podcasting, Lola was the unfortunate person to discover the remains of a girl and feed the local legend of a brutal murderer, the Toymaker.

The story goes that a woodworker from the town used to dress up as Santa and hand out carved toys to children, before becoming a murderer. Lola discovered the body in the fabled Toymaker’s abandoned house, which helped feed the myth. Those events inspired her interest in true crime, as she explains to her audience in the first few minutes of the film. Her story is supported by a fun animated sequence, which was a clever way to show some flashbacks on a tighter budget.

But now that Lola’s back, people around her start getting picked off one by one by a mysterious figure, coincidentally also clad in a Santa costume. The killer leaves little toys and cards behind for Lola to find. With her sister and a few of their old friends, she starts to sleuth around while the local police prove dismissive and unhelpful.

Carnage for Christmas goes by quickly, with a 70-minute runtime, which works both in its favour and against it. In the era of two-hours-plus features that overstay their welcome on our screens, Carnage for Christmas keeps it short and sweet, moving at a sharp pace through Lola’s murder mystery adventure. The editing was a bit choppy at times, jumping from one scene to the other with little to no establishing shots. Where its briefness hurts is in the story becoming heavy with exposition, including lengthy, stilted dialogue. Maio Mackay’s youth shows in both the quality of dialogue and the need to explain rather than show. There is a lesson to be learned there for the teenage director: the tried and true narrative technique of “show, don’t tell” would have greatly benefited the film. Shorter dialogue would have certainly helped, not only story-wise but performance-wise.

Talking about performance, Carnage for Christmas offers about what you’d expect from an indie B-movie. Jeremy Moineau is a charming presence as Lola, but she comes off as uninterested during scenes where a sense of urgency would have been required. Dominique Booth is overly bubbly next to her, delivering her lines as though she’s reading them off the script. The rest of the cast is similarly wooden and amateurish, sometimes standing around in the background rather boringly, or emoting in obvious ways.

Carnage for Christmas is ambitious too: it tries to weave a plot using flashbacks to Lola’s teenage years, casting doubts on old bullies, friends, and acquaintances. The effect would have worked better if there were more than a single flashback scene (and some flashes to the animated sequence). Having established a first flashback as animation, Maio Mackay should have stuck to that choice for the remainder, instead of offering one live-action flashback, confusingly casting the grown-up characters as their teenage selves, and using it repeatedly.

Visually, the film is a fever dream. The photography is generally overexposed, and the colour correction cranks the vibrancy up to psychedelic heights in certain scenes, giving the film a trippy look. Unfortunately, it becomes distracting and makes it easy to miss important details and moments, a crucial aspect of whodunits and mysteries. The lighting was also all over the place in a way that didn’t feel entirely deliberate, especially when lighting faces. Either the characters are overexposed, with little to no contrast, or shrouded in darkness. Nevertheless, Maio Mackay seems to have a vision for what she wants her films to look like, and it will be interesting to see her visual identity as a filmmaker evolve.

Finally, Carnage for Christmas delivers on its titular promise with an abundance of ridiculous gore. Among my favourite gory moments were a murder using some type of screwdriver being turned directly into the victim’s neck, as well as a victim’s scalp being torn away by hand to reveal a shiny pink brain—the skull was nowhere to be seen. While several elements of Carnage for Christmas held my interest or showed promise, I couldn’t say it was a great movie. The blinding, overexposed images, exposition-heavy dialogue, and uneven performances made it feel more like a student film than a professional feature.

Still, I’m excited to see what else Maio Mackay comes out with in the future; as she gains experience and refines her storytelling skills, her movies will no doubt establish a new era of queer genre cinema. Carnage for Christmas is ultimately an entertaining, amateurish caper for gore fans, queer audiences looking for representation and community-focused stories, and true-crime enthusiasts.

AUSTRALIA | 2024 | 70 MINUTES | 2.35:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Alice Maio Mackay.
writers: Alice Maio Mackay & Benjamin Pahl Robinson.
starring: Jeremy Moineau, Dominique Booth, Zarif, Olivia Deeble, Joe Romeo & Yassica Switakowski.