Defector Watches A Christmas Movie: ‘Our Little Secret’

This is the time of year when the best, biggest, and most ambitious movies come out. Not Oscar season, but rather that stretch when the halls of streaming services are decked with the brightly lit, thinly disguised advertisements that are the year’s new Christmas movies. There are more than 100 new Christmas films to watch this holiday season, and whether that number horrifies or excites you depends upon how much of a freak you are for the festive. Sabrina is proud to say they are a real Christmas freak, and this year they asked some of their colleagues to watch some of the most, uh, available new holiday movies. The third movie in our lineup is Our Little Secret, Lindsay Lohan’s triumphant return to a Netflix™ Christmas.

Sabrina Imbler: I hope we all enjoyed watching Our Little Secret over the Thanksgiving holiday. Before we dig into this film, I wanted to ask a broader cultural question. I feel like the festive films of the last few years were dominated by Vanessa Anne Hudgens: The Princess Switch, The Princess Switch: Switched Again, The Princess Switch 3: Romancing the Star, not to mention The Knight Before Christmas. But is there a new Netflix queen of Christmas? This year Lindsay Lohan follows her star turn as an amnesiac in last year’s Falling for Christmas, and I dare say, she might have nabbed the crown! What do y’all think? Is Vanessa’s reign over? Can there be multiple queens?

Alex Sujong Laughlin: Wow, pulling in the “Anne.” Retro! I think the Lohanaissance has been building for a few years, and personally I am extremely here for it. As a tween, I had a much stronger parasocial bond with Lindsay Lohan than Vanessa Hudgens, and it’s striking to me how much the sound of her voice brings me back to my childhood. The main thing though, is that after the decade Lindsay’s had, I’m just glad to see she’s like…doing ok? Not speaking in strange accents? Being her usual red-headed charming self. 

Luis Paez-Pumar: Why must we pit two queens against each other? I don’t actually know much about the VAHCMCU (Vanessa Anne Hudgens Christmas Movie Cinematic Universe, of course), but I am fully in on the LiLo experience now. She even did a St Patrick’s Day one! She’s the queen of the holidays, real and drinking (or made-up). 

Sabrina: Absolutely, I felt immediately bonded to this film just watching LiLo back at work, and doing her job well. She looked amazing in every single scene–which may have been expected, as she’s lit up like an angel in every shot regardless of whatever “realistic” lighting might naturally occur in those rooms. And I’m more than glad to anoint her the queen of all holidays. But before we encounter LiLo in the flesh in this movie, we see her in a sweet animated montage that details her relationship with her childhood best friend, Logan, which starts in friendship and ends in romance. Did we like this montage?

Alex: Every good holiday movie has to be told as a story within a story. It’s giving Elf, narrated by Papa Elf.

Luis: I liked the animated montage fine, and it did a good job of consolidating a bunch of relationship I wouldn’t have cared about into a short little bit. However, I really need to talk about the “passage of time” montage that followed the intro sequence.

Sabrina: Luis, that time-jump montage was one of the most striking cinematic inventions I have ever seen. While I was watching it, I felt like how people who saw Megalopolis must have felt, probably. Do you want to describe it for our readers?

Alex: Oh my god I completely forgot about that montage and I was staring at your sentences thinking “What are they talking about?” and then I remembered the spiral with the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge and Stranger Things and uhh…Covid??

Luis: I will gladly explain whatever fever dream that was. So after Logan and Avery (the LiLo character) break up, we shoot forward 10 years into the future. Instead of a boring “10 years later” interstitial, this movie, bless its heart, went year by year from 2014 to 2024, pulling landmark events from each year to show the passage of time. However, the events they chose are…questionable, to say the least. Shout out to Netflix for throwing in its shows as important things everyone remembers; I had a laugh at the “Bridgerton becomes the most streamed show” or whatever it was.

Alex: Notably, because this was a Netflix movie, there were SEVERAL Netflix references. 

Sabrina: I actually took notes on some of the “landmarks,” which, in the context of the montage, were introduced as equally significant events. We began innocuously enough in 2014 with the Ice Bucket challenge, which was followed by Hamilton breaking Broadway records and same-sex marriage in 2015, Beyond Meat and the royal wedding in 2016, the Thai soccer team rescued from the cave and Notre-Dame burning down, as well as the broader concept of virtual reality in 2018, (the year 2017 is strangely omitted from the montage altogether). Then 2019 began with the CYBERTRUCK, Greta Thunberg becoming Time’s Person of the Year, Bernie Sanders’ mittens, Bridgerton, NFTs, the Mars Perseverance Rover, the big boat getting stuck in the Suez, and Squid Game. The year 2022 brought us England getting a king, the broad concept of AI, Argentina winning the World Cup, Twitter’s blue bird being replaced by X, and 2023 opened with California suspending driverless vehicles, Barbenheimer, and the Taylor Swift Eras tours—at least these are the ones I wrote down. Everything came so hard and fast that I felt like I was hallucinating, in part because the choices were so arbitrary as to be baffling. They mentioned Kobe Bryant retiring but not his death in a helicopter crash. The montage clearly went out of its way to be apolitical—not mentioning COVID-19 (beyond showing Bernie in a face mask) or Trump’s election in a montage of the “most important events” of the last 10 years? I hope it was worth it to secure those MAGA and anti-vaxxer viewers! And why were two of these world-consequential events centered around Elon Musk? Was this some kind of subliminal Tesla advertising? Is X going broke because it spent thousands of ad dollars for a primo cameo in Our Little Secret?

Luis: Wow, Sabs, you really came prepared with the notes. I was going to rewatch it for the purpose of this blog, but now I’m just going to rewatch to feel like I’m on drugs once again. Also, this movie is how I realized Hamilton is older than gay marriage. That feels ominous.

Sabrina: And that’s why Hamilton is more revered. When the montage ends, we meet LiLo and Logan in their modern lives. LiLo is working as a consultant of some kind, and Logan is working as a builder.

Luis: I don’t want to skip ahead, but I just want to foreshadow that Logan working at a construction company eventually led to my own personal biggest laugh of the movie. We’ll get there.

Alex: Oh boy I can’t wait. I didn’t ever quite get a sense of what LiLo did, but I did appreciate that we adhered to the romcom trope of “woman gets big powerful job, man builds things.” I am realizing maybe I didn’t pay great attention to this movie because I’m not sure if LiLo is moving back home from London or what.

Sabrina: I also have to ask both of you, before we actually dive into breaking down who is dating whom in this movie…did either of you watch the show Pretty Little Liars?

Alex: I’m sorry to say I did not, but I was on Tumblr from 2009-2013 so I’ve seen a lot of gifs. 

Luis: I watched the first season? So I am aware of Mr. Ezra over here.

Sabrina: Alex, what I would give for your unsullied brain! Luis, I’m glad you also braved the trenches. For anyone who didn’t watch, the actor who plays Logan, Ian Harding, plays a high-school English teacher, Mr. Ezra Fitz, who falls in love with his high-school student, Aria. When I watched this show in high school I simply thought this was the most romantic storyline of all time because I had not yet learned about the concept of grooming. So it was triggering to see this guy fall in love with LiLo. My brain kept going “she’s too young for you!!”

Luis: Shout out to Lucy Hale, who plays Aria and is exactly one day older than me. Anyway, yeah, I gotta admit, I didn’t find it as creepy when I watched PLL back then as I do now, thinking back on it. The funny thing is that LiLo is age-appropriate for him in this! His girlfriend in the present day is not, though! Way to avoid typecasting, Ian Harding.

I guess we should probably do a quick explanation of the plot in this movie before we go too much further. I’ll give it a shot: LiLo and Logan dated, they broke up when she moved to London, 10 years pass. They arrive at the same Christmas gathering, as they are unknowingly dating a pair of siblings. Upon meeting, LiLo immediately decides that they should not let anyone know they dated, providing us with the hijinx-worthy premise that drives Our Little Secret. 

Alex: I really enjoyed the tiniest characterizations we got for the two other partners, LiLo’s boyfriend, Cam, and Mr. Ezra-Logan’s girlfriend, Cassie. By which I mean: in the first scene we meet the girlfriend, she’s extremely blonde and looking at her phone, which means that she’s going to be superficial! And when we first meet the boyfriend, he’s bragging about how much money he’s making off crypto. I just really enjoyed how completely one-note each of these characters was.

Luis: LiLo’s boyfriend is played by Jon Rudnitsky, which is not noteworthy except that he plays an extremely wholesome idiot in Set It Up, my favorite Netflix movie by far. So it was fun to see him be a crypto dipshit in this. Speaking of LiLo’s boyfriend, whose name is Cam I believe, his family… I love them. What a stupidly perfect Christmas movie family. You’ve got the crypto moron, the stoner teenage brother, the aforementioned Ezra-Logan paramour who is Cam’s sister, and then Kristin Chenoweth as the mom. I love her so much, her voice sounds like she’s constantly sucking helium before takes, and she plays the mean mom with more aplomb than this movie might have deserved. (Also there’s a dad, he’s almost a non-entity until a later plot twist.)

Alex: It was such a delight to see Kristin Chenoweth pop up, especially because she’s just been ambiently on the mind for the last several weeks because of all the Wicked press.

Sabrina: And Kristin Chenoweth’s dog in the movie kind of looks like Toto…maybe this was the greatest subliminal promotional campaign of the season.

Alex: OK so back to plot: LiLo is desperately trying to impress her boyfriend’s mom, and Logan is trying to secure new business for a “lifestyle community” from his girlfriend’s family friend. So LiLo agrees to use her fancy consulting experience to help with his business proposal as long as Logan makes her look good for boyfriend’s mom.

Luis: OK, now it’s time: Logan’s plan during this movie is to create a proposal for that community, which Tim Meadows asks for on Christmas Eve, for some reason. He works hard throughout the movie on the proposal, and when we finally see it, the front page just says…”Construction Proposal.” I’m not sure why, but every time they showed “Construction Proposal,” I lost my mind. 10/10 prop design, Netflix team. It really was a construction proposal.

Alex: Also this is extremely set in Atlanta, which adds a perfect sprinkle of millennial gentrification to the whole thing. I can just see the sterile coffee shops and turf dog parks that will populate the “lifestyle community.”

Sabrina: Thank you both for keying in on this because the proposal, both as it was discussed by Logan and also made manifest in the laminated booklet, was my absolute favorite part of this movie. I had to pause it when LiLo opens the proposal book later on, revealing phrases like “Exterior Elevation” and “Underwater Treadmill Rehabilitation.” What kind of community is this complex for?

Alex: Oh there’s also a skeet shooting range!

Luis: I have to say, the proposal subplot also threw my expectations for a bit of a loop. Upon reading the premise, I thought this was going to be a typical prank-heavy movie, where Logan and LiLo go back-and-forth making each other look bad. But no! It actually was really sweet; they had some arguments and silliness, but for the most part, I thought they were a very grown-up duo, helping each other out and being generally nice. That threw me for a loop, but also made the eventual reunion a lot more earned at the end. I hate when movies go for enemies-to-lovers with breakneck speed, and this movie actually put in the work to explain why they would get back together. It helps that both leads were really charming; LiLo of course, but Harding put in the work to make Logan not appear dickish, boring, or spiteful. Great stuff, team.

Sabrina: I also found their dynamic super sweet. And I kept wondering, was part of the reason he cared so much about this new (building) proposal because his (marriage) proposal was rejected by LiLo so many years ago? A man can only propose so many times in his life before he gets discouraged!

Alex: WOAH, close reading, Sabs! Just let the guy propose a plan and stick with it!

Luis: Can we talk about the church scene? I want to talk about the church scene.

Sabrina: Yes, the first hijink of the movie! So Lilo is feeling starved after a morning looking for Christmas trees, so she eats unidentified snacks out of a suspiciously metallic bag in a jacket she borrowed from Kristin Chenoweth’s youngest son, who by the way is played by the most Republican looking child I’ve ever seen. As soon as she ate the bag I knew she was a goner. She ends up high as a kite just as it comes time for her to do a special reading for the kids. How did you feel about how LiLo pulled it off?

Luis: I love when actors have to act intoxicated on screen. It’s always a wild ride. I’m still not sure why exactly she was doing a reading—Logan suggested it as a way to endear herself to Kristin Chenoweth, I guess, but what a strange thing to do—but the movie wisely lets her just be like 30 percent weirder without making it too over-the-top. Really enjoyed her asking about her nails, and specifically noting that they grow from nowhere, which feels true even if it’s wrong. Anyway, the movie decides to have her have an internal monologue while at the pulpit of the church, and she rambles on a bit before starting to say the lyrics to “Celebration” by Kool & the Gang. Great fun ensues, as the church choir starts singing it, then the crowd gets into it, and everyone claps and dances and in no way learns anything about Christianity, as the priest helpfully points out afterwards.

Alex: I was definitely a bit confused by the church because Kristin Chenoweth mentions early on that it’s a “Christmas mass,” and that, plus the way the priest is dressed and the presence of altar boys and a realistic wooden crucifix on the altar lead me to believe this is a Catholic church. Which raises questions for me, someone who grew up Catholic. First: why is an outsider giving a speech at Mass? Occasionally there are readings, but if Catholicism is one thing it’s ex-clu-sive. The other thing was the choir, which was prepared to sing at a moment’s notice and also suspiciously diverse for a metro Atlanta church (I SAY AS A GEORGIAN DON’T COME FOR ME). They’re singing in a Black southern Protestant style at a church where Kristin Chenoweth and the most Republican looking teenage boy attend. Metro Atlanta is one of the most segregated places I’ve ever been so I have a hard time believing in the existence of this church, but maybe I am splitting hairs.

Sabrina: When Lilo and the family return to Kristin Chenoweth’s palatial home, LiLo walks by a haunting series of family portraits where only Kristin is spotlit in a vaguely medieval halo, leaving her children and husband in the shadows. Each time these portraits appear in the movie, someone makes a crack about how Kristin Chenoweth never ages, which really made me expect that she would be revealed to be a real live witch at some point in the movie. I was disappointed by the lack of magic!

But there was real magic to be found in Logan’s notecards, which he has been dutifully illustrating late at night as “concepts” for his Construction Proposal Lifestyle Complex. Each of the concepts, which are only ever referred to as concepts, include labelled drawings like SPORTING CLAYS and TRAP. He is nervous about the concepts, but LiLo tells him that she thinks the concepts are really great, and also that she has emailed him a Template for his Proposal. Just another example of how well-matched they are!

When Logan goes to bed, LiLo remains with a big plate of cookies…leading to the next hijink of the movie—where she eats a dozen cookies intended for a cookie exchange, and frames Kristin’s dog. How did we feel about the attempted cookie scam?

Luis: I was so worried for the dog! Rosco, our dog, has eaten a chocolate chip before and I spent the entire night wondering if he was going to barf, so this was not a fun sideplot for me. Glad she’s ok, though. I enjoyed seeing Dr. Spaceman himself Chris Parnell play a doctor, in this case the dog’s vet, who plays a key role in one of the dumbest and yet perfectly fitting ideas from a romcom character: LiLo decides to bribe the vet into playing along with her con, and so Kristin Chenoweth is led to believe that her dog had her stomach pumped and what not, when in reality the dog was completely fine. Chris Parnell The Vet has low morals, because while he puts up a bit of resistance, he eventually caves to this plot.

Alex: I loved this subplot because it follows the Normal Gossip Animal Rule: no pets get hurt. It’s also established earlier on that Kristin Chenoweth is weird about who eats cookies and how many cookies they eat, which felt like a kind of flimsy way to set up tension about LiLo eating the cookies, but there we are. They did look a bit dry to me, though. Kind of biscotti-like.

Sabrina: Yes, Alex! When I saw that jar of cookies, I was like, there is no way in hell a woman like Kristin Chenoweth is offering cookies from a JAR for a cookie exchange. Those cookies should be frosted to the nines.

The next section of the movie was kind of a blur to me—we get more glimpses that Lilo’s boyfriend Cam is kind of a shitty guy, and potentially cheated on her with his own childhood best friend, Sophie, a stone-cold hottie who deserved a bigger role in this film! Meanwhile, reliable Logan is at work on his Building Proposal Lifestyle Complex. But soon he discovers one of the first secrets of the movie: that Kristin Chenoweth’s husband is having an affair with Tim Meadows’ wife, played by Carla from Scrubs. 

Alex: This is where the movie starts to feel almost Shakespearean. A childhood friend of Cam’s shows up and they seem to have the exact same story that LiLo and Logan have (childhood best friends, a past relationship, she moves to London). The way everyone trades partners in the end reminded me of The Taming of the Shrew—and actually, looking at the summary on Wikipedia just now, the whole movie was a bit Shrew-shaped in the sense of taking a woman who is problematic somehow and making her less difficult (though in this case, she just becomes less difficult by leaving behind this family that makes her act weird).

Luis: I’m not sure what the point of all this was, except maybe to do a “like father like son” thing for Cam and his dad. It should be noted that Sophie is Carla-from-Scrubs’ daughter. It’s not important, really, but there’s a lot going on in these two families.

Sabrina: So in the grand climax of the movie, everyone swaps partners: Kristin Chenoweth’s husband goes off with Carla from Scrubs, Cam gets together with Sophie, Logan’s family continues to gaslight his grandma with dementia, and LiLo gets an extended scene that is essentially a Ring doorbell ad where she begs Kristin Chenoweth to get Tim Meadows (her new boo) to consider Logan’s proposal. He does, and accepts it—all because of the Concepts! If there’s any lesson to be had here, one simply cannot undervalue Concepts.

And finally LiLo and Logan reunite in her childhood home, where she rejected his proposal back in 2014, surrounded by an identical batch of family and friends, and he asks if they can try again. She says yes! And a year later they get married.

Luis: God, we didn’t mention that Henry Czerny plays LiLo’s dad like a Sam Elliot who is really into Jimmy Buffett. I did enjoy the tiebacks to the beginning of the movie, from the same setting for their reunion as for their breakup, and the animation is cuter the second time around. Like I said above, I do love that this movie really did earn the reunion, which was a certainty the second I pressed play but which got to its logical conclusion in a sweet way. 

Sabrina: After I finished watching this movie with my friends, we played a fun thought experiment based on the moral of this movie, which is that your soulmate is someone you met when you were like 10. Would you move back to your hometown if it promised a chance at true love?

Alex: HA that’s a trick question because as a military brat, I don’t have one.

Luis: I don’t think anything could get me to move back to Miami, but that might be because I can’t imagine having a Miami-native soulmate, and I say that as a huge insult to myself.