If you, like me, are a millennial just on the fringe of Gen Z, Christmas has come early this morning, in the form of the first trailer for Netflix’s highly anticipated new holiday film, Falling for Christmas. But this isn’t just any old, cheesy Netflix Christmas movie dumped on the streamer alongside the dozens of other originals each year. This one’s got a secret weapon, a presence so captivating that not even Netflix’s trusty Vanessa Hudgens can compete. It’s the world’s most tenacious redhead: Lindsay Lohan.
That’s right. You heard me! Grab your iPod classic. Open up your windows to sing to the birds. The sun is shining and we’ve turned back the clock to a far simpler time. It’s 2006. The Dawn of the Lohanaissance is upon us. Rejoice, rejoice, Emmanuel (or whatever they say in that one song; I don’t know—it wasn’t on either of Lindsay Lohan’s two studio albums)!
Falling for Christmas is Lohan’s first major film role since 2013’s much-maligned (and misunderstood) The Canyons—if you don’t count her 2019 werewolf D-movie, Among the Shadows, which no one does. Netflix clearly knows that her return to the screen will be a treat for viewers, as evidenced by Lohan whipping a sleep mask off her face to reveal herself in the trailer’s intro, which I assume would elicit hooting and hollering if this were to play in theaters.
Lohan stars in the film as Sierra Belmont, a pampered hotel heiress who’s fed up with her titanium-card status. “When people look at me, all they see is the spoiled daughter of a hotel magnate,” she laments in the trailer’s opening. “I just want people to remember me for more than my last name!”
When Sierra’s boyfriend proposes to her on a luxury ski trip at the top of a windy mountain, she evidently gets her wish. While he’s on one knee, she’s blown down the slopes by a gust of wind. Don’t you just hate when that happens? When she wakes up, her memory is completely gone. With nowhere to go, a local, blue-collar lodge owner (Chord Overstreet) offers to put Sierra up until, hopefully, someone finds her to remind her of who she is.
If that sounds like Overboard on the slopes, it’s because it is. But what’s wrong with that? Nicole Kidman comes to an AMC theater for magic, and I come to Netflix during the holidays for warm, familiar stories I’ve seen 1,000 times before. And that’s exactly what we’re getting here, with a Christmas tree on every corner, copious amounts of fake snow, and enough red flannel to wrap the Taj Mahal.
As time goes on, Sierra begins to realize that maybe the simple comforts are all she really wants in life. “Sometimes, you can’t rush things,” Lohan says in the trailer, slow-dancing with Overstreet, who remains nameless in the clip. This is the Lohan show, we’ll get to you in Trailer 2, blondie!
But for what it’s worth, Lohan and Overstreet's chemistry is already off the charts. They did work together in one episode of Glee, after all, and a Ryan Murphy-forged bond lasts forever, whether you like it or not. Still, Lohan steals every frame of this trailer, instantly reminding us of why she was such a star in the early aughts. It appears she hasn’t lost a lick of that magnetism, showing off some fabulous comic timing and her physical comedy chops in the trailer.
Top it all off with the Mean Girls-sized wink of a jazzy “Jingle Bell Rock” cover (that I’m 99.3% sure is being sung by Lohan), and Falling for Christmas might just have the most heartwarming trailer of the year.
Seeing Lohan bounce through a lighthearted romantic comedy, a la Just My Luck, is precisely what the doctor ordered. But whether it’ll be enough for Sierra Belmont to recover her memory is a question that only Falling for Christmas can answer when it arrives on Netflix November 10.
