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Netflix’s Falling for Christmas Is a Dante’s Inferno-esque Allegory

By law, Netflix Christmas rom-coms have several tenets they must adhere to. Each film must feature a dead woman, a sad widower, a failing local service business, and a disturbingly precocious daughter whose incessant smile or furious frown indicate how well they have processed and integrated their mother’s untimely passing. The central conflict must revolve around class consciousness and the bucking of some social hierarchy in the name of spontaneous lust, after which a rich person learns to be more poor and subsequently happier (Netflix is in the pocket of American oligarchs whose fates rely on this coded cinematic brainwashing of the proletariat). A monarch and a journalist must have a charged interaction, often of a romantic nature. An elderly man must haunt the city where the protagonists live, playing God. The set-design budget must never exceed $40. And the film’s titles are required by law to either feature an exhausted holiday pun or a series of starkly descriptive nouns.

For example, The Knight Before Christmas is homophonic wordplay nodding at a classic holiday poem; A Castle for Christmas is an extremely literal plot summary. The Princess Switch series fulfills its direct promise of being a trio of films about princesses switching; Love Hard is a tenuous but begrudgingly acceptable recursive pun about the main characters’ love of the film Die Hard and hard-won realizations of love for one another. However, Falling for Christmas, the latest entry in an esteemed canon, defies the unspoken rules of the Netflix Christmas Cinematic Universe (henceforth referred to as the NCCU) by being neither a pun nor a plot description. This marks a troubling departure from the traditions of the NCCU and as such, it’s important to study it closely and attempt to tease out its meaning.

Falling for Christmas is, on its face, a tepid rom-com about a spoiled hotel heiress named Sierra (Lindsay Lohan, in her most convincing comeback attempt) who falls down a mountain, bonks her head, gets the kind of amnesia where she remembers being obscenely rich but not the specifics of her life, and is inexplicably asked by the hospital to convalesce at the struggling inn of a total stranger, Jake (Chord Overstreet). That’s where the first part of the title comes in: A woman is falling. In fact, Lohan falls several times over the course of the film, which takes place over four very long, surreal days. One would assume that the doctors would order her to stay in bed for at least 24 hours, but instead, despite suffering from a serious head injury and continuously losing her balance, she takes on several jobs at the inn, including stripping her bed and washing her sheets every single morning.

So is the title a pun? Let’s consider this at length, for some reason. Yes, Sierra falls many times, but she is not falling on behalf of Christmas itself, nor due to a Christmas-related injury, nor in the name of creating some kind of Christmas miracle. She falls off a cliff after her influencer fiancé proposes at the edge of it for #content, and later, she is falling so much because she is concussed. It’s not a homophonic pun, nor is it homographic, meaning it neither plays with synonyms nor double meanings. Were the movie to take place in the fall, or feature some kind of autumn-specific conflict, it might work on that pun level, but no — it takes place in the days before Christmas in a very snowy small ski town (albeit one large enough that its two primary hoteliers, Sierra’s father and Jake, have not crossed paths until the events of the film, and its mayor, hospital staff, police force, and entire township do not recognize the internationally famous daughter of the foremost local tycoon).

Nor is Falling for Christmas about a woman who “falls for” the concept of Christmas. Sierra is not a heart-hardened cynic who must be convinced of the power of love and celebration; she is, in fact, rather cheerful. She is not, conversely, a scrappy socialist-adjacent who refuses to participate in the Christmas economy. Rather, she is so wealthy that her father has given her a fake job — “vice-president of atmosphere” — to make her feel empowered while avoiding actual labor, and she is awakened each morning with a platter of caviar and a stylist proffering couture.

Relevantly, that stylist is played by Lohan’s sister Ali, which caused me to pause for a long while and wonder if the film is, in fact, an It’s a Wonderful Life–slash–Dante’s-Inferno-style dream ballet taking place in Limbo, operating on both an existential and literal level, exploring Lohan’s hard-won fifth chance at a Hollywood career, with Netflix itself representing the last cord tethering her to our reality and Chord Overstreet representing Dante’s Charon ready to ferry her soul to Hades. In fact, this is the only reading of the title and the film that makes any coherent sense. It explains away every plot hole: the fact that not one person searches for Sierra for four straight days (she is in another dimension), that every single outfit pulled from the local inn’s lost and found fits Sierra perfectly (it was her fate to arrive here), that an unnamed Santa-slash-Jesus figure with terrifying veneers keeps interfering in the plot machinations (a nod to the doctrine of Christian predestination), that there is a horse named Balthazar, and that Chord Overstreet only thrice directly addresses his own maniacally grinning daughter, clearly an agent sent directly from the underworld attempting to beguile and imprison Sierra forever in the dank bowels of hell (where they do not have enough bookings for the season).

Several attempts are made by the surface world to reach Lindsay/Sierra in her suspended limbo state, via a TV that spontaneously plays Netflix’s A Castle for Christmas, and a physical copy of Brooke Shield’s character’s book from that same film. But first she must travel through each circle of hell, including Heresy, wherein she eats bacon despite saying she “doesn’t do bacon,” and Treachery, wherein she learns that her fiancé was gay all along and using her for clout. Ali Lohan/The Stylist/Virgil is the only person who expresses visceral concern for Lindsay/Sierra along her journey, and ultimately rescues her from her near-downfall, appearing at the beginning and end of the film as a marker of Lindsay/Sierra’s return to her recognized reality and the warm embrace of a lucrative multi-picture Netflix contract. And though the film ends with Lindsay/Sierra asking Chord Overstreet to spend Christmas with her in the suspended universe of the budget inn, their fate is not conclusive, and the lighthearted nature of the post-credit bloopers suggest that Ali has not allowed the limbic dimension to swallow her sister entirely.

In this sense, it’s quite possible that Falling for Christmas is, in fact, a description of the film’s plot, or at least its larger cultural narrative. Lindsay Lohan fell — that is to say, from grace, and as a leap of faith, across genres and generations and the shadow of her own public crises, and into the underworld — in the interest of Christmas, or Netflix’s interpretation of it, which is all that will matter in the future. Waiting for her at the bottom, after searching for her for so many years, we caught Lindsay. But the film reminds us that we must not forget about that burbling subterranean river, upon which floats the eternally patient Chord Overstreet.