I am all for a good, heartwarming Christmas movie around the holidays; however, does A Castle For Christmas measure up to these expectations? Netflix’s description of this movie reads, “To escape a scandal, a bestselling author journeys to Scotland, where she falls in love with a castle — and faces off with the grumpy duke who owns it.” Based on this description, I was expecting a Grinch who stole Christmas or perhaps a Christmas Carol-type beat, but I came to find a completely different plot. The movie starts off with Sophie, the bestselling author, being interviewed on a talk show discussing her latest book. The interaction turns sour when Sophie is asked why she killed a popular character in her book, leading her to have a freak out on television. This humiliating event prompts her to leave the country and head to Scotland. She selects Scotland because her father told her stories about the Dunbar Castle when she was young. Once in Scotland, Sophie meets a group of knitters who she befriends, and along the way, she becomes infatuated by Dunbar Castle. Long story short, Sophie buys the castle and lives with Myles, the financially-strained duke. For some reason, the duke continues to live in the castle with Sophie, and they end up falling in love. When Sophie asks Myles to stay in the castle with her permanently, he gets insulted and angry. As a result, Sophie tries to go home on Christmas Eve but changes her mind when Myles comes to declare his love. Towards the end of the movie, Sophie and Myles settle their argument and attend the Dunbar Christmas party. Also, somewhere in the plot, Sophie pays off all of the villagers’ mortgages. 

If you think this brief description is boring, then you can imagine how bad the movie is. Upon researching reviews on this movie, it is apparent that most either love it or hate it, seeing as a majority of the reviews are split evenly between the 1-star rating and the 5-star rating. I would say I agree with the 1-star ratings. The movie was a typical boy meets girl, and they “hate” each other and then end up falling in love. Do not get me wrong, I love those cheesy plots as much as the next person; unfortunately, though, the leads had no chemistry, and the weird Scottish bagpipe music playing behind the kissing scene was a little too trite. Also, the movie overall was very hard for me to get through in one sitting. I had to watch it over a span of three days because I kept losing interest. This may be because I generally only watch shows/movies if the actors are accomplished, and this movie’s actors did not really “bring down the house.” In addition, a good wardrobe could have saved the movie in some regards, but basically, all the characters wore outfits that my grandparents would wear to Thanksgiving, except for Myles’s Christmas Eve outfit, which not even my grandparents would be caught dead in. Aside from this, there was also no good line of reasoning to the movie: A rich American woman comes to a little village in Scotland and buys the castle and practically buys the entire village? She took the spirit of giving to a whole new level! 

I can say I expected A Castle for Christmas to be cheesy, yet I did not expect it to be as predictable as it turned out to be. You may be wondering why I continued to watch this movie, and to this, I can respond that everyone I asked about this movie said they liked it; therefore, I went into this viewing experience with high expectations. Mrs. Wallick had this to say about the movie, “I think it is a good movie to watch around Christmas to get in the spirit.” The only good thing that came out of this movie, in my opinion, was reading the bad reviews on Google. My advice is to save yourself the misery and just watch Elf this Christmas.