The Advent Calendar: A Christmas Horror Review

The Advent Calendar, directed by Patrick Ridremont

In which we ask what a gift is worth

Merry Christmas one and all! Today we’ll consider what would happen if Tiny Tim wasn’t such an angel. 

You know who’s hard to shop for? People with birthdays in December. My mother-in-law and sister-in-law both do, so if you have a similar gift-giving challenge in your life, I extend the hand of fellowship. 

What do you give for an early December birthday? 

Well, a really cool advent calendar can be fun. The advent calendar Eva Roussel (Eugénie Derouand) gets for her December 3rd birthday looks really, really cool. Her best friend Sophie (Honorine Magnier) swiped it from a German Christmas market and it’s great: twenty-four doors to unlock, seasonal paintings on antique wood, a slightly eerie piece of Gemütlichkeit with a surprise for every day of the festive season.

Of course there’s a bit of a catch, but it doesn’t seem serious at first: you’re not allowed to dump it. Seriously. On the back in Gothic script is the warning: you dump it, I kill you. 

Who’s this ‘I’ who’s going to snuff you out? Well, ‘Ich’, obviously, as Sophie jokes. 

And who’s Ich? Let’s just say that when Eva opens the first door, it doesn’t just unlock a candy. We see a glimpse of something awaken.

Around the first sweetie is wrapped a list of rules. How do they sound to you?

1. The calendar contains candy. If you eat one, eat them all. Or I’ll kill you. 
2. Respect all the rules until you open the last door. Or I’ll kill you.
3. Dump it and I’ll kill you.

But of course Eva eats the first candy. Wouldn’t you? 

This is a game of rules.

Cat-and-mouse games between hero and monster are a high-risk, high-reward way of telling a story. The rules have to be tricky enough that there’s room for manoeuvre but rigid enough that the threat is real, and the story lives or dies on whether the final resolution lives up to the premise. 

But if they go right then they’re so much fun – and The Advent Calendar sticks the landing. I’ll talk more about how after the spoiler warning, but the more I think about it the more I think I love it. 

What does Eva want for Christmas?

Eva could do with a bit of cheering up. Her beloved father is in the last stages of cognitive decline and no longer talks, and he lives under the care of a stepmother that hates her. She’s single and lives alone. She’s struggling part-time at a shitty job and about to be fired, and the reason for this is that she’s in a wheelchair. 

I put it in that order because that’s the refreshing presentation the film takes: Eva’s disability isn’t a tragedy in itself. She doesn’t like it: she used to be a promising ballerina, and then an accident left her paraplegic, and of course that stinks. But she isn’t doing the Me Before You BS of deciding that life with a disability is intolerable and the only thing to do is die gracefully and leave everything she has to, like, a proper person. 

Eva is trying to get on with life. We even learn later that the car accident that paralysed her was caused by Sophie, but the two of them are still best friends. Eva insists she doesn’t ‘blame’ her, and it’s more or less true: it was Sophie’s fault, but Eva gains more by forgiving her than resenting her, so that’s what she’s done. 

Eva knows how to make the best of things. So a fancy advent calendar with a chocolate and a mysterious motto every day? What’s the worst that can happen?

Hoo boy.

Let me ask you another question:

If Christmas could grant the most desperate wish of your heart . . . what would you be willing to pay for it? 

Disability is a theme I return to at intervals in this column because, well, I’m disabled and so are some of my loved ones, and so I notice. There’s a couple of upcoming essays in the bank that talk about it more, and I’d meant to take a break from the subject so it wouldn’t get too lecturing. But The Advent Calendar crept up on me. Eva’s paraplegic and she has a Faustian advent calendar; of course her paraplegia is going to come up. 

There are horror films that revolve around a character’s disability as a plot point, and they can be done well or badly – at some point I may get around to reviewing Silence and Darkness (2019), also on Shudder, which does it quite brilliantly – but for Eva, that’s not quite it. 

It’s not that she’s a wheelchair user that makes the horror important. What’s important is how it affects her relationship with other people. 

It’s not the disability, it’s the sodding ableism

Eva used to dance before an accident paralysed her legs. Clearly she regrets the loss – but that’s not what grinds at her day to day. What grinds is how people treat her. 

The Advent Calendar runs a pretty good gamut of the various bullshittery you get when you’re disabled. Some of it is extreme: if you’re sensitive to sexual assault, steer clear, because there’s a truly nasty scene where a douchebag takes advantage of Eva’s paraplegia. Then there’s open discrimination, as seen in her boss, who’s quite ready to fire her for being disabled. These are probably what people picture when they hear the word ‘ableism.’

But fortunately the film recognises that this is not the only kind, nor even the most common. Almost worse than the boss is the patronising co-worker who coos about how brave Eva is, and how she couldn’t possibly work ‘in that state’. People do that, and we hate it; here’s a Ted talk so you won’t have to listen to me complain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8K9Gg164Bsw. But there she is, the woman edging Eva out of her job, pluming herself on her compassion while telling Eva how amazing it is that she has the courage to act like she’s just as good as the rest of us, and when I saw that scene I said aloud, ‘Yeah, she has to die.’ 

There’s smaller things.

Like the way Eva’s disability acts as a kind of invisibility field. Right at the start we see an affable himbo hit on Eva at the swimming pool, and then freeze in confusion when he sees her chair and stop flirting. At another point the calendar grants Eva a wish: she gets into a romance with the cute guy who keeps jogging past her at the park, and it’s clear that once he pays attention he both likes and fancies her – but without a magical nudge, she was just the disabled woman he overlooked. 

And then there are little rubs that make you wonder if you’re being paranoid. Eva and Sophie go on a double date, and Eva’s date ends the night going off with Sophie – and sure, sometimes the ‘wrong’ people click on a double date and maybe it would still have happened if Eva could walk, but you wonder. You have to wonder. 

It’s all well done. Eva’s life is limited by her paralysis, but not beyond bearing. She has her home set up so she can get about fine. It’s when she goes out and has to wheel through rooms not set up to make space for her chair, or deal with people being weird about it, that it really chafes.  

I only have one regret on this score,

because it misses what’s possibly the commonest social headache of all: what you might call the well-meaning kind. People want to be nice, but they just can’t stop noticing that you’re disabled even when you try to set them at their ease, so they fuss and fluster and tiptoe and generally make it clear that they aren’t going to relax and talk to you like a normal person however normally you act. It’s depressing and extremely uncomfortable, and it happens quite a lot. 

Mostly the film is on point, so it’s a shame to see that aspect missed. It’s perhaps a little present in the fact that Eva’s closest friend, who does treat her like a normal person, is someone who knew her before the accident? Though I found an interview with Ridremont I’ll quote below in which he says some rather disappointing things, so it’s possible he didn’t spot it because it’s a beam in his own eye – but I’ll take what I can get, and The Advent Calendar is generally great at giving us a character with a disability who’s primarily a character. 

We like Eva. We root for her. And we don’t want the calendar to destroy her.

But how many other people in her life are we willing for it to destroy?

Behind This Door Are Moderate Spoilers

The calendar, it turns out, really is a gift. It can give you what you want most terribly. 

But you’ll have to sacrifice everyone around you to get it. 

At the start it’s not so bad. The guy who assaults Eva dies in a marvellous horror scene where her dog turns the Advent surprise-of-the-day into a kind of voodoo doll. I think we can all agree he has it coming. Fuck that guy. 

Her patronising co-worker meets a similar fate. Do we care? We do not; frankly I’d have wanted her to die even if this was a rom-com. 

But what about Eva’s father? He’s dying anyway, and in a moment of lucidity he tells Eva it’ll be his turn at some point, and gently urges her not to hesitate. He really is a lovely man – so lovely it hurts to think of him being sacrificed. 

Eva’s dog? At some point the calendar wants her sweet little Marvin.

And Sophie? Oh, Sophie. She didn’t mean to paralyse her best friend. She loves Eva. Eva loves her. But if she dies, Eva will be able to walk again. Dance again. Dance like she did before Sophie crashed the car. 

It’ll want everything and everyone. 

So the question The Advent Calendar really poses us is this: is Eva’s paralysis the worst thing that could be? She had something terrible happen to her; what if instead it happened to everyone else? If she had to weigh her mobility against everything else in her life, which would she choose? 

That’s not as easy a question as it sounds.

The disability bit

I was curious during the film, at least for most of it: did they cast a wheelchair user? Disabled actors have been pointing out for a long time how frustrating it is to see disabled parts go to able-bodied actors while they can’t return the favour. As it turned out Derouand is not disabled, and there are practical reasons why that was the easiest casting choice, but she handled the chair gracefully enough that I wondered what the film’s position was on the whole thing.

I kind of wish I hadn’t looked it up, because I found an interview that lowered my opinion of the director.

(https://wickedhorror.com/features/interviews/shudder-the-advent-calendar-patrick-ridremont-interview/) Asked about why he cast an able-bodied actress, Ridremont said this:

Patrick Ridremont: I have many reasons why I didn’t choose an actor who was really paralyzed. The first reason is I love movies that are fantastic, that are not real… We want to make you believe that everything doesn’t exist. Everything is fake.

Playing with someone who really uses a wheelchair — I knew that all the interviews will be over that. I knew it would have been too big for my little shoulders because it would mean that she was not playing. She was herself. It also could be a kind of — how do you say when you say a bad thing about someone? We say en injure in French.

Wicked Horror: Oh, like the saying — adding insult to injury?

Patrick Ridremont: Yeah! It could be an insult to say that the actress living in a chair that, “Ah, well, you’re not acting.” And it’s like, “Fuck you. ” She probably would be playing but that’s not the thing that everybody is looking at.” I was afraid she wouldn’t be seen. That’s the first reason. The second reason is that if I came with such an idea, it really would have been so difficult for me to explain to my producers.

I hate to say it, but that sucks. Everything has to be fake?

There’s plenty that isn’t fake in his film. Are the men played by women and vice versa, the young played by the old, the able-bodied by the disabled? Nope. I mean, if anyone makes a movie where all the adults are played by children in drag then please let me know because I’d absolutely watch it – but that’s the reasoning of someone for whom disability isn’t really real. 

As to his concern over reviews . . . sure, a bad reviewer might have said something insensitive. But assuming his concern was for the actress rather than himself – let’s give him the benefit of the doubt there – wheelchair users aren’t infants. A disabled actress if perfectly capable of deciding for herself if she wants to deal with her performance being underrated – and if she doesn’t, what’s she supposed to do, play able-bodied characters? Since paraplegic actors cannot, in fact, walk, by Ridremont’s logic I guess every disabled performer had better resign themselves to a career of voice work. 

Now, I’m not necessarily faulting the casting.

Derouand herself is excellent, and the film has perfectly good practical reasons for casting an able-bodied actress: there are scenes a paraplegic actress wouldn’t be able to do. If that’s all he’d said about it I wouldn’t be sniping at him. It might have been really cool to cast a wheelchair user and do the necessary scenes with a body double – films have been known to use body doubles for ballet, as witness Black Swan (2010) – but that calls for budget and effects and not everyone has Natalie-Portman-movie levels of money. On its own, ‘The part has physical requirements’ is sometimes just one of those things. 

But Ridremont’s rationalisations call sharp attention to the fact that, ‘I don’t think I’m ableist but I just can’t relax around disabled people’ was the one common form of discrimination he failed to depict. He says himself in the same interview, ‘Maybe I was a little bit too shy to do it.’ It might have been a better film if he’d got over that shyness. 

However, the reason this interview pisses me off so much is that the film itself raised my hopes. So let’s separate art from artist and look at it on its own. 

How well does Derouand handle the chair? 

I can talk about some aspects of disability because I walk with a rollator – a walker with wheels and a seat – but as I didn’t dare joke on BlueSky when I put out an ask about this, judging Derouand’s performance is not in my wheelhouse. It is, literally, not how I roll. (If I can’t make crap puns it’s not my revolution.)

So I had to ask social media, and I wasn’t able to find anyone who both uses a wheelchair and has seen The Advent Calendar. – but someone whose brother uses a chair and who’s used to ‘all sorts of wheelchair shenanigans by his hospital mates’ was helpful enough to chime in. (Shout out to Jenn @thenoisesabove.bsky.social) ell me that the performance was, at least, passable. ‘Nothing stood out’ was how they put it, and that’s pretty good going. The Wicked Horror interview notes that there was a consultant on-set who was a wheelchair user, so by the looks of things Derouand got coaching and paid attention.

What I can say confidently is that the use of the chair feels right. There are shots where we see Eva has hung her bags off it; you do that with a mobility aid. There are moments where Eva is trying to manoevre around furniture laid out on the assumption that everyone can walk, and they play just as galling as they are in real life. The general feeling that this is Eva’s normal is absolutely on point. 

Which makes the ending hit all the harder.

Door 24, Behind Which Are Terminal Spoilers

Eva discovers something hidden in the calendar: a painting showing the calendar in a previous year. Previous murders have happened, and it looks like the artist’s wife and son were sacrificed. 

But when she tracks him down, he’s furious and confused. 

His wife and son are fine. And how could he have painted it? He’s been blind for five years. 

Eva figures it out, and so do we: we’re seeing a gorier It’s A Wonderful Life, right? She’ll be taken through the same journey he must have undergone: your disability removed, your art restored, everyone you loved destroyed. And then it’ll be December 1 again and you’ll remember nothing, but the heavens will see you chose love over self. 

Right?

Actually it’s harsher than that. 

That’s how it could go. But it doesn’t have to. 

It’s the affable himbo from the opening scene at the pool, of all people, who works it out. Eva, expecting her paraplegia to return tomorrow, drops him a booty call on the 23^rd so she can enjoy the sensation while she still has it. But what does rule 2 say, he notices? Respect all the rules until you open the last door.

Until.

After you open the 24^th, the rules are all off. You can throw the calendar away and nothing will happen. 

You don’t have to eat the sweet.

And if you don’t, you won’t get the final magic: being returned to the 1^st of December with all this undone. You can keep all the gifts and all the curses. You can dance again – if you just let everybody you love stay dead.

Oh, I wanted to watch Eva eat the sweet. I’m on a waiting list for a pain clinic but there’s no magic candy for me, and so I have to do what she was doing: make the best of it. It’s true, disability isn’t the worst thing in the world. If people aren’t dicks about it you can have a perfectly good life. I wanted to watch a film say that.

But then again, I can write sitting down. Eva’s injury took not just her mobility, but her art. 

Eva holds the candy. She thinks about it.

She screams.

Jump to a year later where the next calendar owner is looking for her. And if he finds her, will she be in her chair or on her feet?

We don’t find out.

The ending made me angry and then happy

Oh, I was pissed at first. I really was. But then I thought about it. 

Here’s another horror film, a really excellent one with a completely different tone. The ending of The Advent Calendar brought it unexpectedly to mind. 

Possum (2018) is a tough watch.

If child abuse isn’t something you want a film about, both physical and sexual . . . don’t. If you have kids, you will need to hug them afterwards. 

Philip (Sean Harris) was a children’s puppeteer, but some unknown disgrace has forced him to his childhood home in Norfolk – and it wasn’t a happy childhood. Philip’s parents died when he was a little boy and left him at the mercy of Maurice (Alun Armstrong), a grotesque goblin of a man who delights in tormenting Philip emotionally even now, and obviously did worse to him as a little boy. 

There’s a missing kid in the story: a young boy Philip spoke to briefly on the train has been kidnapped, and we wonder what Philip had to do with it. Or what Maurice had to do with it? Or what Possum, Philip’s terrifying trauma-puppet that he can’t get rid of no matter how he tries, had to do with it? 

Possum is brilliant and horrible, a mental scar of a film. And one thing about it that’s interesting is that it has one of those deliberately ambiguous finishes that spawn ‘Ending Explained!’ YouTube videos. Is Philip a victim? Is he a victimiser? Or is he both? Who really took that boy?

I thought about it when I finished Possum. I went back and forth. and I struggled with the fact that the interpretation I wanted, which was to pity Philip with all my heart, might not fit all the events of the story.

And then I realised: that’s the real ending of Possum. 

It ends in your head and in your heart. 

Philip, up close, is a knot of pain, dying from lack of love. But Philip from a distance is the kind of creep responsible adults shoo away from the children’s spaces where he sadly lingers, and they’re not wrong: if you had kids to protect and you saw a man like this, you’d run him off too. You’d have to. You have to protect your children from ending up like Philip.

But would you also feel compassion for him? Would you think about what his life had been before now? Because Possum brought me to a place where I had to choose if I thought Philip guilty or innocent – and having spent a film watching a man I’d steer my kid away from in real life, it made me really, really want him to be innocent. 

That’s the explanation of Possum. It ends with you seeing a broken boy in the body of an adult man, and wanting to think well of him.

And that’s where the ending of The Advent Calendar takes us. 

It’s a whole lot less bleak than Possum, of course, but it ends with the final door unopened – and that forces us to think about what we want to be behind it. 

Because what we want ends up saying a lot about how we see disabled people. Artists too, of course, but the film doesn’t dwell much on Eva’s lost artistry; it’s her disability that shapes every scene.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Eva’s predecessor lost his wife and child. Of course you’d give up your sight for your son. If you wouldn’t, you’d probably deserve a visit from Ich. 

But Eva doesn’t have a spouse and child.

She got hurt too young to have built a family who’d stand by her for better or worse, and now she might never get to. The artist’s son is more than five years old; his wife must have married him when he could still see. But Eva was just beginning her adult life at the time of the accident, and while maybe she could still find love, it isn’t as easy for her as it once might have been. She has paralysed legs. She has a big scar on her back. Romance often starts in sexual connection, but she has no sensation from the wait down. We see man after man either exploit her disability or fail to see her because of it.  

Even leaving aside the would-be rapist and the horrible co-worker, who Eva she have to protect? A dying father who gave her his blessing to kill him? A dog? A boyfriend she only just met, when there’s a world of attractive men who might want her if she could walk? 

The closet person she has to sacrifice is her best friend Sophie. Who is dear to her, but who also put her in the wheelchair, and now Eva has to sit and watch as she has a lot more fun than Eva. All Eva’s loved ones matter . . . but it’s not the bone-deep parental instinct to sacrifice anything at all for your child. 

Eva has a choice. The ethical option is clear – but let’s not pretend it isn’t hard. 

Because if we pretended it was easy – whichever choice Eva took – we’d be pretending that disability is simple. And that false belief is what drives a lot of the prejudice Eva has to deal with. 

If we saw Eva decide to keep her mobility and sacrifice her loved ones, what would that say? That disability is the worst thing in the world. Which it’s not, if people aren’t awful about it, and thinking it’s the worst thing is a big part of what makes them awful. 

But we saw Eva do what I wanted her to do, and she threw away her chance to walk in order to save the people she loved, what would that say? That actually disability isn’t that big a deal. It’s not so difficult. Which sometimes it is, and thinking it’s not is another part of what can make people awful. 

The only way not to be awful about it was to deny the audience an easy answer and make us grapple with it for ourselves. That forces the acknowledgement of both realities to happen inside our own heads – which is where we really hear it. 

We have to acknowledge that in the end, it’s not us who get to decide how Eva feels about her paraplegia. Her body is hers and she has to live in it. And whether or not her choice is the ‘right’ one . . . well, roll a mile on those wheels before you try to cast your vote.  

What would the advent calendar offer you? 

What would you give anything – everyone – to get back? And if you had the choice, and you actually had to take it . . . are you sure you’d do the selfless thing? 

It’s easy to say you would – if saying it wouldn’t change anything. But putting that candy in your mouth, well, that’s another question. And it’s a question that makes you feel the weight of both possibilities. 

Man. I’m not sure I like Ridremont himself, but The Advent Calendar really got it. 

There are minor nits to pick. The biggest is that Ich-the-monster is excellent as a figure in the shadow realms, but when we see him on screen he’s obviously just an actor in prosthetics and a mask. Fighting a little shyer with him probably have been wise. 

You can also get a little stuck on some of the details. Does it really count as eating the candy as per Rule 1 if it’s your dog that eats it? (In case you’re wondering if there might be a translation issue and it actually says something like ‘They all have to be eaten,’ I wondered too. We don’t see the full German text; Sophie translates it into French as, ‘Si tu en avales un, il faut les avaler tous,’ which Aliette de Bodard – https://www.aliettedebodard.com/, check out her books – kindly helped me parse and assured me can only be interpreted as ‘You have to eat them all.’ So either Sophie’s a fast and loose translator or the monstrous Ich is more fast and loose about the rules than at first appears.) 

But fussing over details aside, these issues are fairly minor; it’s not perfect, but it still lands. 

Christmas is supposed to be a time of gratitude, right? We’re glad for what we have. But sometimes what we don’t have is impossible to ignore. The calendar offers a Christmas miracle – but when it’s a monster making the offer, no miracle is free. 

Check out The Advent Calendar. It’s the time of year for parlour games, and this one plays you back.