Avoid this completely.
We generally will watch anything for fun as we are relaxing by the fire after a busy day in the Christmas season.
This film had promise. The initial setup seemed like a good start. A puppeteer in NYC fails at a must-make-it job and then returns to her parents' home in Maine, convinced she is finished in life.
A "quirky" cast of characters intersect with her life, especially when she has a flash of insight about a mysterious past even when she narrowly escapes death.
But the clews in her premonition aren't enough to solve the mystery, so she tries to recover her past through hypnosis and then by repeating the near-death experience.
Then, near the end of the movie, she has a flash of insight and finds the real meaning of the dream/premonition because -
Ope. The movie just ends.
Yikes.
We watched this with another couple and all of us shouted our dismay at this terrible, manipulative ending. NOTHING THAT HAPPENED IN THE FILM MATTERED.
The protagonist "learned something special." Everything else was just a set of MacGuffins.
The puppeteer aspect? DID NOT NEED TO BE A PART OF THIS AT ALL.
The near-broken down car? What?
The "Chekov's gun" in the first scenes? (The walkie talkie.) Not used to advance the plot in any way that mattered.
The love interest? More like the love skim and turn away. Not a single spark between them.
Nothing made sense with regards to plot or pacing or character development or anything that makes a movie something that is more than 90 minutes of colorful lights on the screen.
I do not fault the actors. They played their roles well, but their roles/characters were limited by the script, and as usual with these Christmas movies, they couldn't make obvious inferences from events or ask the right questions or learn from previous mistakes.
This was a terrible script.
I think about how there are so many directors and producers and actors and stagehands and all the rest who are looking for work, and Netflix throws money at these films that seem to be put together by a film crew working as hostages.
It seems that the film itself was recomposed in the editing room, but it still didn't make sense.
We generally will watch anything for fun as we are relaxing by the fire after a busy day in the Christmas season.
This film had promise. The initial setup seemed like a good start. A puppeteer in NYC fails at a must-make-it job and then returns to her parents' home in Maine, convinced she is finished in life.
A "quirky" cast of characters intersect with her life, especially when she has a flash of insight about a mysterious past even when she narrowly escapes death.
But the clews in her premonition aren't enough to solve the mystery, so she tries to recover her past through hypnosis and then by repeating the near-death experience.
Then, near the end of the movie, she has a flash of insight and finds the real meaning of the dream/premonition because -
Ope. The movie just ends.
Yikes.
We watched this with another couple and all of us shouted our dismay at this terrible, manipulative ending. NOTHING THAT HAPPENED IN THE FILM MATTERED.
The protagonist "learned something special." Everything else was just a set of MacGuffins.
The puppeteer aspect? DID NOT NEED TO BE A PART OF THIS AT ALL.
The near-broken down car? What?
The "Chekov's gun" in the first scenes? (The walkie talkie.) Not used to advance the plot in any way that mattered.
The love interest? More like the love skim and turn away. Not a single spark between them.
Nothing made sense with regards to plot or pacing or character development or anything that makes a movie something that is more than 90 minutes of colorful lights on the screen.
I do not fault the actors. They played their roles well, but their roles/characters were limited by the script, and as usual with these Christmas movies, they couldn't make obvious inferences from events or ask the right questions or learn from previous mistakes.
This was a terrible script.
I think about how there are so many directors and producers and actors and stagehands and all the rest who are looking for work, and Netflix throws money at these films that seem to be put together by a film crew working as hostages.
It seems that the film itself was recomposed in the editing room, but it still didn't make sense.