Coming on the heels of Thursday’s Thanksgiving football, it’s fitting when discussing Our Little Secret to take a quick look back at seemingly innocuous moment in the 2024 NFL season. During one of this year’s NFL London games, following an interception of NY Jets’ quarterback Aaron Rodgers, two Minnesota Vikings defenders, Cam Bynum and Josh Metellus, impressed both football fans and the media with a hilariously delightful celebration, in which they recreated Lindsay Lohan’s memorable handshake from Nancy Meyers’ 1998 The Parent Trap. It was a jubilant moment, one holding simple throwback appeal on one hand, while also inviting us to consider when the last time was that a family rom-com had carved itself so deeply into a few generations’ collective memories, and if any recent films could pass the test of time in the same way in the future? Even without fully buying into the pessimistically sullen attitude of the many who believe that modern-day rom-coms are something of a lost cause or a declining — or worse, agonizing — genre, what’s evident is that most contemporary pop culture products indeed rarely imagine themselves to be(come) more than a mere seasonal attraction or affectation. This ephemeral quality seems to be even more present as the governing principle as it relates to streaming service offerings as we move into the end-of-year holiday season. And on that note, releasing this week is Stephen Herek’s Our Little Secret, which marks the third consecutive collaboration (and the second of the Christmas variety after Falling for Christmas) between still-beloved millennial teen queen Lindsay Lohan and Netflix.
With a briskly upbeat prelude, Our Little Secret quickly introduces primary players Avery (Lohan) and Logan (Ian Harding), a supposedly meant-to-be couple who due to life circumstances — Avery decides to leave Peachtree City for London to pursue her dream job offer and subsequently rejects Logan’s marriage proposal — have to part ways. After a timeline-establishing opening credits sequence that marks seemingly random important cultural moments throughout the past decade, from the viral ice-bucket challenge of 2014 to Taylor Swift’s recent Eras Tour, the film quickly catches viewers up to the present day, wherein Avery, who’s now a thriving business consultant, flies back home (or close enough) for the holidays. But when she attends the Yuletide family gathering of boyfriend Cameron (Jon Rudnitsky), she finds out that Logan is, as the Hallmark template that Netflix gleefully cribs from dictates, dating Cameron’s sister Cassie (Katie Baker), a cringe-comedic situation that instantly shapes Avery and Logan’s titular secret during their holiday stay at the Morgans as the exes try to conceal their past, painfully-ended relationship to avoid the awkwardness that forthrightness would engender.
But despite the film’s initial promise of a little creativity that lures viewers into anticipating a more playful and even quirkier Yuletide rom-com, such wishful curiosity is gradually upset due to Hailey DeDominicis’ script, which frequently lacks enough humor and verve, and gives little development to any of the other characters here. Indeed, Lohan has proved many times that her natural on-screen amiability and charm alone can easily make even the most mediocre films into pleasant watches — which is also why she deserves to be handed much better projects than these seasonal trifles — and Harding is a suitable partner, effortlessly establish chemistry with the whole ensemble as a charming good guy, nowhere more so than in his quieter one-on-one scenes with Lohan. But again, part of the problem with Our Little Secret, especially in its first half, is that instead of developing Avery and Logan’s relationship with their new partners, which would establish some complicating stakes, the film spends too much time detailing Avery’s struggle to please the siblings’ cartoonish and overbearing mother Erica (Kristin Chenoweth), largely in the form of smoothing over a series of none-too-funny minor fiascos, like delivering a speech (which just ends up being Kool & the Gang lyrics) at the local church after accidentally eating a handful of weed gummies or a ridiculous scene where Avery frames the family dog for her munchies-driven cookie binge.
Our Little Secret does begin to find a more solid anchor in its second half, delivering more amusing set pieces, specifically as the quartet of the young people are given more screentime together, as well as when the Morgan family’s youngest son Callum (Jake Brennan) begins to bring some mischievous hijinks to the film. But largely, Our Little Secret’s family-friendly take on mismatched relationships and emotional secrecy never rises above the tier of harmless one-time holiday viewing, the kind of film you’re happy to watch as tree lights twinkle but which you’re unlikely to return in future years. Lohan’s vibrant performance does most of the heavy lifting here, not for nothing, and in terms of its narrative, style, and production design, Herek’s film relies less on the repetitively formulaic Hallmark visual signifiers that impart a clichéd typicality; in resisting the postcard saturation of reds, greens, and sparkle of Christmastime fantasy, the film actually feels more reminiscent of 2000s-era, studio-driven holiday flicks. But while that’s all enough to keep Our Little Secret from feeling like the total flop that so many other films of this seasonal ilk prove to be year after year, what’s not a secret, to borrow the parlance of Bynum and Metellus, is that this Christmas confection still feels like an undeniable fumble.
DIRECTOR: Stephen Herek; CAST: Lindsay Lohan, Ian Harding, Kristin Chenoweth, Tim Meadows; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; STREAMING: November 27; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 41 min.
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