Bitter Christmas (2026)

July 28, 2026

Watched this as a sneak preview, meaning you watch a movie that is currently being released but don’t know in advance which one it will be.

The movie is about a writer who writes a screenplay about a writer writing a screenplay. Its main theme is the ethics of using real-life events as inspiration for stories, although it could also be interpreted more broadly as being applied to any creative process.

Here’s what I think: the screenplay within the screenplay is intentionally terrible. From the final dialogue, where someone criticizes the writer for it, it seems like the creators were fully aware of that. Just to name a few examples, the character Bonifacio is introduced but then nothing is ever done with him—he is simply forgotten for the rest of the movie. Something similar, but in reverse, happens with another character, Santi, who is introduced much later and also goes nowhere. Overall, the screenplay feels poorly written, lacks a clear point, and never develops into a complete narrative.

It seems like this was done intentionally so that the last ten minutes could become a discussion about how bad the screenplay is and how the writer became so obsessed with creating something meaningful that they ended up producing something terrible.

But that leaves me wondering: did I really need to watch over an hour of a bad movie just to make that point? You intentionally make 70% of the film bad, only to criticize it in the final ten minutes. That doesn’t make the earlier parts any more enjoyable.

Another issue is that almost all of the movie’s meaning is explained in the final dialogue. It feels like the film has to stop and tell the audience what it was trying to say instead of showing it naturally. “Show, don’t tell” exists for a reason. If your movie isn’t communicating its ideas well enough that you need a character to explain everything at the end, then something has gone wrong.

I liked the music selection.

5/10