A Castle for Christmas



Brooke Shields has been around for decades and my first recollection is probably The Blue Lagoon. Then her cameo in Friends when that show was really on fire. And now we have her in a romantic comedy that’s become a Netflix tradition. Last year there was Operation Christmas Drop about a couple bonding over love, and doing good deeds, and Christmas.

A Castle for Christmas is more like a fairy-tale but you are seriously going to have to bear with me on this. This is about an American romantic novelist (Sheilds) who has angered millions of her fans and escapes America as she is basically cancelled. She lands up in Scotland and that’s where the trouble starts. Not narratively, but because the first Scottish accent you hear is subtitled. Sophie goes to a castle and one of the people she meets there offers to give her a tour, and she sneaks to the off-the-tour part of the castle…


Now the man she meets seems like the keeper or something, but he is Myles—and it turns out that it’s his castle which, it transpires, he is selling. Myles is played by Cary Elwes, a legend in The Princess Bride but with a Scottish accent he must’ve learned from Star Trek.


The main conflict in the plot is around the castle and the obvious ending, but Sophie befriends the regulars at a pub in the town. There’s a knitting club and they’re all fans of her books and nobody is upset like her American readers are. When Sophie is going through difficult times in her relationship with Myles, and she wants to leave it’s them who try and pull her back.


So yes. A fairy tale in which the “Prince” is unhappy and so the village is unhappy. Somehow the happiness of everyone is related to his fortunes and whilst that might be a flashy retool of feudal unpleasantness somehow it makes the story seem like a Disney thing.


And while Disney has got into trouble for some pretty glaring material in its history, this is on another level. The look of the place is just as you’d expect in a Christmas film: it looks like a Richard Curtis movie, a cleaned up and pristine view of a village with its wonderful pub and its red phone boxes and mailboxes. This is all to be expected, encouraged and loved. But did Cary Elwes have to do an accent that’s so far from how he usually speaks. The film gets to the point very quickly after dispensing with the setup in minutes, but the arrival in Scotland, the subtitling of “no bother” and a few other things stops the flow. Having said that the plot is otherwise nicely played out and the film does indeed look nice and Christmassy.

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