Defector Watches A Christmas Movie: ‘The Christmas Quest’
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 fifth movie in our lineup is The Christmas Quest, a movie that pushes the boundary of what a neckline can be.
Sabrina Imbler: I’m so excited to talk with both of you about Hallmark’s first and potentially last foray into the special kind of love that stems from a mutual interest in Icelandic antiquities. Before we talk about the movie, I would love to learn more about your relationship with archaeology and the rich cultural traditions of Iceland. What interested you in watching this movie in particular? Had you heard of the Icelandic Yule Lads, or Jólasveinar, before?
Maitreyi Anantharaman: I’ve never been to Iceland! If I have any relationship with archaeology, it is a purely cinematic one: I am always down to watch Indiana Jones or National Treasure. I love artifacts, runes, hunts, and inessential but much-appreciated gala scenes, so I figured I’d see what Hallmark could do with the genre.
Barry Petchesky: Iceland is outside of my personal interest zone, though I do have some stakes in Germanic languages, what with speaking English and all. And we can’t discount the Nordic region’s rich musical history. So I’m excited to spend today with you both discussing Dimmu Borgir, the seminal symphonic black metal band. The Yule Lads were new to me, and to be honest, I feel like I know only very slightly more about them after watching The Christmas Quest.
Sabrina: Seems rude that this movie was not scored by Dimmu Borgir, a band that I was totally familiar with before now. Maitreyi, I’m glad that you brought up Indiana Jones, because this movie opens with one of those classic tomb-raiding scenes, only somewhat gentrified because it takes place in a rustic barn with hints of shiplap. We watch as an archaeologist who is later revealed to be Lacey Chabert’s mother shining a flashlight in a very dark space that contains a mysterious stone box, sealed and covered in runes. This scene also sets up the rules of how this movie defines the process of archaeology, which seems to be the act of going into a dusty room, finding the secret button—every artifact has one—and pressing it to reveal a treasure, which in this case is an old-timey journal by a guy named Magnus Olafsson. How did we feel about the authenticity of this scene?
Barry: I was impressed by the Yule Lads’ mechanical wherewithal. I would’ve sworn buttons weren’t a thing until the Industrial Revolution or so, but that just goes to show how little I know about Christmas magic. I haven’t seen any of the National Treasure films, but I’d bet there were buttons involved too. Maybe Sausage-Swiper learned engineering from George Washington or whatever.
Maitreyi: Barry, watch National Treasure! Most of the National Treasure clues, if I remember right, are written on various documents in invisible ink and engraved on secret bricks—definitely a less mechanical movie.
Sabrina: After Lacey Chabert’s mother discovers the old-timey journal, we jump ahead to the present, where Lacey Chabert is a distinguished professor of archaeology at a college in Rhode Island. She is giving a lecture on the lore of the Yule Lads—13 boisterous, troll-like beings that do highly specific acts of mischief in the 12 days leading up to Christmas—that is rapturously received by a packed room of undergrads. Each Yule lad has their own thing: Þvörusleikir licks spoons, Hurðaskellir slams doors, and Gáttaþefur sniffs in doorways in search of yummy Laufabrauð, etc.
Barry: Which Yule Lad are you? I’m definitely bowl-licker.
Maitreyi: They’re supposed to be prankster elves, but I do feel like they would be useful for doing dishes? Many of them have signature traits like “scraping pots” and “licking spoons.”
Sabrina: As a longtime fan of Siggi’s, I identified with Skyr-Gobbler, who gobbles skyr.
Later in her Yule Lad keynote, Lacey Chabert reveals that her mother, the archaeologist, discovered the 17th-century manuscript of Magnus Olafsson, which holds the secrets of the Yule Lads’ treasure. The Lads allegedly spent centuries amassing “a trove of priceless treasures,” presumably in the time when they were not licking bowls and doing other licking tasks. Lo and behold, a mysterious and wealthy man who snuck into Lacey Chabert’s lecture asks if she will help him find the treasure on a last-minute Christmastime quest! And so begins the series of clues and riddles that comprise the bulk of this movie.
Barry: This will come up a lot, I suspect, but this is my first Hallmark movie, so I’m unfamiliar with the tropes. When we first go to meet Lacey Chabert’s tall ex-husband, an expert in dead languages, he is selling Christmas trees. We learn he’s just helping out his family, something he does when he’s not being a university guy, but in my notes I wrote “THERE IS ZERO REASON FOR HIM TO BE SELLING CHRISTMAS TREES.” Is that just for the vibes? Is it just cozier to do a scene surrounded by firs than in another office?
Maitreyi: Character development, Barry. This establishes him as the sweet family man whose marriage was wrecked by his careerist, adventure-seeking wife!
Barry: It could’ve been any other type of shop! But I will go with it. I wonder if the guys selling trees in front of my CVS can read Younger Futhark.
Sabrina: I guess I imagined the academic job market would be tough in this universe, even for one of the world’s few experts in translating Nordic runes, so the Christmas trees were a seasonal hustle. Barry, you should definitely show some runes to your tree guys.
Maitreyi: Lacey Chabert definitely has tenure. Her office is so nice! Big windows, a lovely view of the quad. And I’m glad that, like Indiana Jones, she got her own hot professor hotly professing scene—though I don’t think she is canonically hot the way Indiana Jones is shown to be in his classroom scene.
Sabrina: To be fair, it is harder to be hot when you’re doing archaeology in Scandinavia. Fewer chances to be sweaty and show some skin. At least we get to see Lacey do a single archaeology on her own, which, again, does not take place in an actual tomb but in another dusty attic-like space where she presses a button to reveal the long-lost Yule Horn of Dimmuborgir, which she needs her ex-husband’s help translating with the help of the old-timey journal. Lacey Chabert and her ex-husband have kind of a tense, Christmas-tree surrounded standoff, but he clearly is also a freak of treasure. Soon they’re jetting off to Iceland to stay in a hotel that seriously looks so nice.
Barry: I wonder if real-life archaeologists think about treasure that often. But yes, Iceland time! To my pleasant surprise, a lot of it appeared to have been filmed on location. My impression of Hallmark films was that they do not have the highest production values, and are all filmed in whichever Canadian province is offering the best tax breaks for filming. But this was a really good-looking movie! I wonder if the Iceland Tourism Board paid for it. If so, it definitely worked on me. I especially appreciated the heavy-handed tour-guide-ness of it all. “Oh look, it’s the Saint Thorlak’s Day walk for peace.” Of course it is!
Sabrina: This movie definitely made me want to go to Iceland. Every location was stunning. I did find it funny that Lacey Chabert specifically stated that because it’s winter, there are only four hours of sunlight every day. Yet every single day of their trip, they are driving to distant volcanoes and glaciers to take leisurely hikes in ice caves and various ruins, without ever really worrying that sunlight will run out. The movie seems to suggest that Iceland is approximately the size of Rhode Island. They do get trapped once after dark, where they encounter a mysterious rival treasure-hunter who almost abandons them in a booby-trapped cave, but then throws them a rope.
Barry: Christmas magic.
Sabrina: They then set off to solve the Yule Lad’s first clue. What did you both make of the ways the clues were set up in the movie? Did they seem appropriately tricky as befitting a prankster lad of yore?
Maitreyi: The ending maybe explains this a little, but no, I was pretty disappointed in the ease of access to clues. The various rooms and caves they explored seemed to have pretty clear paths, and I found it increasingly hard to believe that NO ONE EVER, in hundreds of years, had been able to find any of this stuff.
Barry: That’s because they didn’t have the Yule Horn of Dimmuborgir, duh. The clues were fine. The bishop bit was even slightly clever.
Sabrina: The clues were just vague and koanic enough to remind me of Rupi Kaur poems. But I liked the idea of the Lads around a conference table writing down things like “The light in the darkness will show the way,” and being like, “Yes, perfect, let’s go with that.”
Barry: I was a little disappointed by the amount of clue-solving in this movie. We got a couple of them, and then I guess the screenwriters got tired of coming up with clues and dispensed with the next eight or nine in a single montage—a montage that spent at least half its shots on Lacey Chabert in various alluring but still modest winter fits.
Sabrina: In one scene, Lacey is figuring out a clue related to numbers in a strange sweater with an intriguing series of holes around the neckline, when her ex-husband says one of my favorite lines in the movie: “Unless Vikings used additive and subtractive properties.” Barry, is that true?
Barry: The Norwegian extreme metal band Enslaved used time changes to good effect on the excellent Axioma Ethica Odini. That’s probably what they mean.
Maitreyi: I loved all the necklines, particularly their subtractive properties.
Sabrina: Maitreyi, could you try and describe your favorite of Lacey Chabert’s necklines?
Maitreyi: There’s one that sort of looks like she’s wearing a racerback tank plus a cardigan, but I think was actually just one garment. Then, of course, she’ll wear a sort of half off-the-shoulder gown to a museum gala she and her ex-husband crash toward the end of their quest.
Sabrina: I loved the museum gala scene. It had everything I want in a Christmas movie: festive outfits, an elaborate scheme featuring a chase scene, and Lacey Chabert impersonating an Icelandic CEO. It reminded me of Vanessa Anne Hudgens doing the voice of Princess Margaret of Aldovia as Stacey Denovo of Chicago—a many-layered performance. Were you convinced by her accent and overall performance of Elsa Tomasdottir (sic, potentially)?
Barry: I think the Icelandic accent is one of the most fun to try on. And it’s not racist to do it, which is a big plus. I enjoyed the whole sequence—of all the activities in the film, the one I’m most envious of is “sneaking around a museum after hours.”
Maitreyi: The “pretending to be someone on the guest list who hasn’t arrived” strategy is a film classic. If I were any of the people she was chatting up at the gala, I might wonder why she was speaking Icelandic-accented English rather than just Icelandic, but I suppose it’s a high-pressure situation and she did her best.
Sabrina: If either of you were in this situation—sneaking into a private invite-only black-tie gala at an Icelandic museum to find the secret button on a very old door that is supposedly on display—what would be your strategy to find the door?
Barry: My anxiety would prevent me from attempting the scheme in the first place, though I might do it for Lacey Chabert, who—full disclosure—was one of my very earliest childhood crushes. But their strategy seemed pretty sound: Split up and uncover all the door-shaped objects. It was a little weird that there were so many door-shaped objects, and that they were the only things in the storerooms that were covered. I wonder if this happens a lot there. Perhaps previous treasure-hunters have gotten further than we thought, only to be thwarted by drop cloths.
Maitreyi: The scheme made me wonder about Lacey Chabert’s standing in the archaeological community. Shouldn’t she have pals that work at this museum and would be able to help her out sans scheme? I’d probably go with another film trope: pretending to be a cater waiter. But I can understand why the filmmakers preferred the option that would get the movie’s leads into fancy outfits.
Sabrina: The idea of Lacey Chabert and her ex-husband in matching server’s suits is almost too homoerotic for Hallmark to handle. But that’s such a good point Maitreyi—how big could the world of Icelandic archaeology be? This reminds me of another question my partner had throughout the movie, which is that Lacey Chabert is presumably this world-famous, globe-trotting archaeologist who knows everything about ancient Icelandic culture except has never learned a single rune, and her ex-husband is completely fluent in runes but knows nothing about the culture that made them. Seems like you’d pick up a little on the long road to tenure!
Barry: Hyperspecialization is the scourge of modern academia. I did respect the commitment to pronouncing “dimmuborgir” slightly differently every time. And to be fair, she had developed a taste for gross fermented fish, which is what makes one truly Icelandic. How did we feel about the late-game twist that the rival treasure-hunter was actually on the side of good, while the billionaire was—shocker—evil?
Maitreyi: Yes, how long did it take everyone to clock Victor Grimes as the bad guy? I was pretty sure from the first scene with him—any lone British character is a good bet to be the bad guy—and I had been wondering about the ethics of treasure hunting throughout the film, so I was disappointed in Lacey Chabert for obviously not vetting this guy or coming to a previous understanding about where the treasure would end up. She is shocked that he plans to sell it to a private buyer rather than donate it to the museum.
Barry: I’m no treasure-hunter but I imagine my very first question, or at least top three, for the suave and mysterious billionaire funding my expedition would be “What are we going to do with the treasure when we find it?” I was a little surprised by his turn because while “English = evil” is for sure a trope, you see it less often for Scottish guys.
Sabrina: The first time I saw Victor Grimes, I was spiraling trying to figure out where I’d seen him—he was on Industry—but I was sure by the time he was revealed to have a private jet that he was up to no good. I can’t believe Lacey Chabert made such a dummy move and didn’t even ask for a contract or anything. Frankly, I didn’t entirely trust her. Do you remember her office had this big bookshelf full of vaguely international relics? Where did those relics come from, Lacey Chabert? Certainly not from Providence!
But I’m so glad we’re talking about the rival treasure-hunter because the moment she stepped onscreen, I felt utterly shocked. It was like the Hallmark universe ruptured and a real person who is allowed to fuck entered through a portal. She was far too cunty for this movie—you could never make me hate her! When it briefly seemed like she was going to let Lacey Chabert and her ex-husband freeze to death in a cave, I wasn’t not on her side. She eventually ferries them to the real treasure of the Yule Lads, which is at the end of a pretty obvious hallway that opens under the church where they got their first clue. Before the treasure was revealed, did you have any guesses for what riches the Yule Lads might have stashed there?
Barry: No! I hadn’t even thought about what the treasure was because the movie had spent so little time dwelling on that question … or so I thought. But in the end, The Christmas Quest is a movie about traveling to the frozen ends of the earth and risking your life to find out that you’ve become your mother.
Sabrina: The real treasure of the Yule Lads turns out to be a room full of cobwebbed tchotkes that is inexplicably lit by hundreds of burning candles—who lit them, the Lads? There are Santa figurines, candlesticks, assorted potatoes. Apparently these are the real things that the Yule Lads valued, which makes sense. On the grand scale of annual pranks to do, they relegated themselves to bowl-licking as opposed to, say, political assassination or even a friendly bit of arson. But Lacey Chabert also finds a locket she gave to her mother for Christmas, which her mother left behind—revealing that her mom had already found this shitty treasure decades before Lacey Chabert would.
Maitreyi: I was so proud of my evildar—I was on to you, Victor Grimes—and so ashamed that I had expected the treasure to be real treasure. I hadn’t even entertained the possibility of some kind of twist reveal. Hallmark got me good!
Barry: I think I was thrown off by the earlier scene, where the possibly magical black cat leads them to a nice older couple’s home and they spend a lovely afternoon baking and decorating a tree. I half-expected the movie to tell me that had been the real treasure all along.
Maitreyi: Did you guys read the Icelandic Christmas folklore Wikipedia page? Was that the “Yule Cat,” a “huge and vicious cat who lurks about the snowy countryside during Christmas time (Yule) and eats people who have not received any new clothes to wear before Christmas Eve”?
Sabrina: OK, I also thought that was the Yule Cat! Kind of like when someone in a movie is not not Santa.
Barry: Given the earlier description we got of a giant black cat, I was hoping for something like Behemoth from The Master and Margarita. If this was the Yule Cat, it’s really falling down on the troublemaking—and child-eating.
Sabrina: I was upset by how the movie omitted all references to cannibalism, which is extremely present in Icelandic Christmas folklore. Who says cannibalism, or at least an ambient backdrop of it, can’t be romantic? Or being chased by an enormous CGI Yule Cat?
Barry: Coming to Hallmark next December: The Christmas Krampus, starring Lacey Chabert.
