Last year, Tello Films (a network dedicated to telling stories about queer women) released one of the biggest surprises of the holiday romance season with I Hate New Year’s. Though it lacked the polish of its Hallmark or Lifetime counterparts, the film made up for it in solid writing, charming leads and a killer soundtrack. This year’s offering, Christmas at the Ranch, shares many of the elements that made that film a success: original songs by former The Voice contestant, Dia Frampton, director Christin Baker behind the camera and a diverse cast. However, while many of the elements of Christmas at the Ranch charm, it can’t quite recreate the lightning-in-a-bottle delight of I Hate New Year’s.
This time, we follow Haley (Laur Allen), a harried tech startup employee who returns to her family’s Nashville ranch after a years-long absence to try and save it from financial ruin. There, she meets Kate (Amanda Righetti), a skilled ranch hand who’s just as determined as Haley, but doesn’t appreciate her big city attitude. Well, that’s not entirely true. Haley and Kate don’t have their first meeting at the ranch. Rather, in one of the script’s cleverest choices, they match on a dating app while staying in the same motel in a nearby big city —completely oblivious to who the other really is.
Absent the baseless grudges they already hold against each other, Haley and Kate get to connect digitally, swiping right based solely on pictures and establishing a baseline attraction that underlies all the interactions that follow. That first scene, where they flirt by text in their separate rooms, is possibly the film’s best. Allen and Righetti play the scene with a charming mix of both eagerness and awkwardness, their characters clearly desperate to connect but wary of getting hurt. Though a black line separates Haley and Kate in the split screen, there’s an intimacy to the scene that suggests the actors are actually filming in the same room. The choice allows the actors’ palpable chemistry to flow freely, making their dialogue feel like banter rather than a chilly text exchange. So, it’s disappointing that the scene that follows it, where Haley and Kate meet face to face in a local bar, decisively dampens all of that building heat.
Now, it’s certainly not abnormal for great screen romances to blossom from antagonism, but the problem here is that the script doesn’t quite justify the characters’ sudden turn. One moment, Haley and Kate are awkwardly flirting and the next they’re no longer interested simply because Haley had to take a work call. While the exchange is meant to emphasize both Kate’s stubbornness and Haley’s disregard for non-city life, neither the dialogue nor unfortunately the actors’ performances quite sells the point. Instead, the moment feels like manufactured conflict meant to make their official meeting at the ranch all the more awkward.
While one mishandled character beat can’t spoil a romance, Christmas at the Ranch unfortunately bungles quite a few of Haley and Kate’s major moments. Righetti and Allen’s chemistry convinces the audience that their characters could fall in love as they make eyes at each other during a Christmas hayride or have to share a bed to keep warm during a snowstorm, but the dialogue doesn’t take the characters the rest of the way, instead defaulting to the awkwardness and antagonism that hurt their connection in the first place. And while the characters do slowly learn more about each other, their trajectory meanders so much that the final emotional beats feel too abrupt.
The same is unfortunately true of the save-the-ranch plot. Haley and her brother Charles (Archie Kao) repeatedly discuss the ranch’s dire finances, but we never get a deeper understanding of how the family makes money from the ranch or what Haley can actually do to help save it. Instead, the plot is in stasis for much of the film until it’s suddenly resolved in the final minutes thanks to a satisfying albeit predictable development.
Admittedly, a somewhat thin plot wouldn’t usually matter in a holiday romance. The Hallmark and Lifetime films basically get away with remaking the same five plots every single year. However, because Christmas at the Ranch‘s central romance can’t sweep us up in the way it should, it also can’t distract us from the film’s other weaknesses. And while it’s still so satisfying to finally get more queer representation in a genre that has been so decidedly heteronormative for so long, it’s impossible not to with Christmas at the Ranch were a little stronger.
