In what is somehow 19-year-old filmmaker Alice Maio Mackay’s fifth feature, Carnage for Christmas, genres abound. Though a slasher makes up the bones of the plot, the narrative is also framed by protagonist Lola’s work as a true crime podcaster, while Mackay additionally uses the Christmas setting both to augment the horror and to bring Lola back to her hometown, placing her in implicit conversation with the past. Carnage for Christmas begins with Lola addressing a listener question about the origins of her interest in true crime. She recounts first a local legend about a toymaker who killed his family and himself after dreaming his wife cheated on him, and follows that up with the story of her own discovery of the long-missing corpse of the murderer’s youngest daughter while engaging in a youth ritual of entering the haunted house.
Lola notes that the kids who dared each other to enter this house were “mostly boys,” and in some ways, the tale stands in for the transition origin story expected for trans narratives, both fictional and non-fictional. Her transness here is a static fact throughout Carnage for Christmas, and all tension surrounding this is brought about by forces external to Lola: it’s her sister’s TERF-y roommate or the gas station clerks giving her dirty looks who are anomalous in this world, not Lola. In fact, the preoccupation with transition that defines much of trans media is distinctly marginalized here — a welcome shift in representation. As it becomes less remarkable for a trans person to make a film, the same is able to become true of the trans characters they write.
Mackay’s welcome delicacy in this regard allows the film’s point of interest, then, to become its genre, which, for better or worse (mostly the former), it largely exists within rather than subverting. The podcast recording at the start of the film essentially functions in place of a flashback, and the director manages to overcome the potential visual blandness of two women talking into microphones for the first ten minutes of the film. It’s in this sequence where the voice of editor Vera Drew, director of The People’s Joker, is most felt, flitting from stylized footage of the kills Lola describes to animated sequences. The rest of this film is not so frenetic as Drew’s own 2024 release, settling instead into amiably straightforward slasher territory and deploying a familiar low-budget horror aesthetic for the rest of its respectably brief runtime. In this, Carnage for Christmas proves to be a suitably compelling watch, likely landing even better for viewers who are fully invested in its playful horror trappings (which this critic isn’t quite). But again, perhaps counterintuitively, that the film is well-executed but somewhat intentionally unremarkable is actually a genuine strength. Though Lola’s transness is ultimately a key point in the film’s plot and its contribution to the slasher, Mackay’s project is more defined by its genre than its queerness. In a climate where representation is too often taken to be its own end, it’s refreshing to see queer representation instead as a statement of fact within a larger vision.
DIRECTOR: Alice Maio Mackay; CAST: Chris Asimos, Dominique Booth, Olivia Deeble, Lewi Dawson; DISTRIBUTOR: Dark Star Pictures; IN THEATERS: October 22; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 10 min.
Originally published as part of Fantasia Fest 2024 — Dispatch 1.
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