A Christmas Karen

Another year, another take on the seasonal story of Ebeneezer Scrooge, except that this time around it’s a woman, and she wants to speak to the manager. There’s great comedic potential in Jon Binkowski’s A Christmas Karen, but it doesn’t always succeed in holding the moral high ground, nor in delivering its more monstrous comedy with the confidence which satirising this particular trope requires.

None of that is the fault of star Michele Simms, who conjures up a nightmare of suburban entitlement with sufficient glee to make her entertaining throughout. Her forcefulness and charisma help to overcome the inherent challenges involved in centring a story on someone so unpleasant. Binkowski makes her cartoonish from the outset, when she demands that young neighbour Nia (Amina Massai) produce a permit or abandon the stall from which she is selling seasonal drinks of hot chocolate, so that later remarks, such as telling people to go back to their own country, are understood as ridiculous; we see just enough of the hurt they cause to keep them from being trivialised, but it’s clear that Karen never gives that the least consideration.

She does, of course, have a heart – just one which is buried under layer upon layer of defensiveness and hard boiled self-serving meanness. We get our first indication of why when she receives a visit from her mentor, Jackie (Meghan Colleen Moroney), 20 years dead and looking it, there to exchange gossip and advise her of the impending arrival of three spirits. These include the Spirit of Christmas Past, Gary (Rolin Alexis), who frightens her not just because he’s supernatural but because he’s black and gay and insists that she touch him. Next up is Joy (Leyla Lawrence), the Spirit of Christmas Present, whom she relates to much more easily but who shows her some uncomfortable things. Finally there is emo teen Damon (Lee Karlinsky), the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come, who confronts her with the really scary stuff. In the meantime, she makes a tragic discovery about little Mia which just might change her thinking.

Simms is very good and handles the shift in her character well, holding onto enough snark even at the end to assure us that she’s still the same person, and making enough mistakes with her good intentions to demonstrate that she still has a lot of learning to do. To make the archetypal Karen character work, however, one has to have a clear idea of its boundaries. Karen’s behaviour is a fair target for criticism; her age and gender are not. A scene in which a group of men ridicule Karen’s appearance (without knowing she’s there) shows really poor judgement – it’s just misogyny in new clothing. Likewise, scenes in which it’s implied that if only she were nicer she would have a husband and maybe some children, as if that could be the only real source of fulfilment in life for a straight woman, are awkwardly at odds with the film’s supposed progressive values.

The real appeal of A Christmas Karen lies in the fact that there ain’t nothin’ like a dame, but US culture has never really seemed to know what to do with such women. Karen is a great character (for good or ill) in a film which doesn’t quite have the nerve to go where it needs to, and which too often falls flat as a result.