‘A typically formulaic seasonal sugar rush’

Lindsay Lohan cannot be stopped. In the space of just two years, she has released festive romance Falling For Christmasromcom Irish Wishcompleted filming on the sequel to Freaky Fridayand even popped up in a Mean Girls cameo. Now, a mere nine months after her last film, she returns with Our Little Secrether latest attempt to convincingly colonise the Christmas-romantic-comedy market.

Directed by Stephen Herek (whose journeyman career has seen everything from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure to the 101 Dalmatians live-action remake), it is another rung on the conveyor belt of seasonal cosiness beloved of Hallmark, Lifetime and — in this case — Netflix: a cheap, disposable bit of fluff, easily watched in the background while wrapping gifts or peeling potatoes. Interestingly, Our Little Secret has less of a high-concept than Lohan’s previous efforts for the streaming service, possessing neither the hare-brained ski-slope amnesia of Falling For Christmas or the offensive paddywhackery of Irish Wish. Instead, it comes with something of an old-fashioned screwball premise: what if you had to spend a family Christmas get-together with your ex, forced to keep your past relationship a secret?

This is a secret decades in the making, as an animated prologue explains: Avery (Lohan) and Cameron (Jon Rudnitsky) were inseparable as kids, a friendship that blossomed into a romance as adults. But on the eve of Avery moving abroad after the death of her mother, Cameron makes an ill-advised marriage proposal and the pair split up. Well, surely, that must be the end of that.

We then skip forward from 2014 to the present day — via some slightly baffling opening titles reminding us of all the major events of the last ten years, including, for some reason, the boat that got stuck in the Suez canal and the first photo of Pluto. Avery and Cameron are both dating other people, both heading back to their new partner’s family for the festive season.

There, in the heavily decorated, fairy-light-festooned, Nancy Meyers-sized house, Avery and Cameron unexpectedly bump into each other. They agree to keep their past under wraps so as not to ruffle any feathers with the in-laws. Handily, this decision leads to all manner of half-baked comedic misunderstandings: an incident where a dog is blamed for eating cookies, a typically wacky weed-gummy hallucination sequence, and a genuinely head-scratching spontaneous rendition of Kool And The Gang’s ‘Celebration’ during a church service.

Curiously, despite her gummy-induced antics, Lohan is less klutzy and goofy than she normally is in these roles, leaving the comic relief to supporting characters, which include a horny grandma, a bolshy altar boy, a domineering Southern Belle of a mother (Kristin Chenoweth) who commissions creepy family portraits and says things like, “Kiss Mommy!”, and a cosy, moustachioed father (Henry Czerny, playing against Mission: Impossible-type).

Inevitably, as time goes on, Avery and Cameron grow closer and remember why they used to care for each other — at one point, Cameron makes the incredible gesture of offering her a lift in his car — but the chemistry between them is never as obvious to us as it seems to be to them. Their inevitable reunion feels driven by the formula of the genre, rather than for any reasons of character.

It’s all a bit by-the-numbers, really. This is not the worst Christmas romcom out this year — snowman-with-abs fantasy frolic Hot Frosty has a good shot at that crown — and that, in itself, is a shame. There’s nothing especially good about it, but that bizarre church singalong aside, there’s nothing laughably bad about it, either: little to laugh at, little to laugh with.