Review

Love Under the Mistletoe
Subtitle: Fifteen years apart, one questionable real-estate decision, and somehow the entire town gets involved in their love life.

Love Under the Mistletoe is a perfect example of why Hallmark movies have convinced us that returning to your hometown is basically a legally binding agreement to fall in love.

Grace is a successful interior designer who is extremely busy with work and apparently has no time for romance. Ryan is her former high-school crush, now a successful financial advisor in New York City. He returns to town after 15 years, and naturally, the first thing everyone does is make sure these two spend as much time together as humanly possible.

Ryan has returned to sell his grandmother's historic house, because apparently the best way to celebrate the holidays is to liquidate your family memories. But don't worry! The town has a plan. The mayor gets involved, a Christmas charity fundraiser needs to be revived, and Grace somehow ends up helping Ryan.

And this is where Hallmark holiday movies really hit their stride.

Two people who haven't seen each other in 15 years suddenly discover that they have approximately 900 unresolved feelings. Every conversation contains a suspicious amount of eye contact. Every Christmas event creates another opportunity for them to remember how much they supposedly meant to each other.

Meanwhile, the entire town appears to have collectively decided that Grace and Ryan's romantic future is a municipal infrastructure project.

There are Christmas decorations. There is nostalgia. There is mistletoe. There is a historic house that desperately needs saving. There are career decisions that suddenly seem much less important once someone starts looking at you lovingly under a string of Christmas lights.

Naturally, Ryan eventually has to choose between his successful life in New York and the possibility of rediscovering his roots. Grace has to figure out whether her carefully organized life actually has room for the one thing she wasn't planning for.

And because this is Hallmark, the answer is approximately as subtle as a Christmas tree falling through the roof.

Love Under the Mistletoe doesn't exactly challenge the laws of romantic-comedy physics, but it doesn't need to. It's warm, festive, predictable, and packed with the kind of small-town Christmas magic that makes you briefly consider moving somewhere where the mayor personally supervises everyone's dating life.

The movie's greatest mystery isn't whether Grace and Ryan will fall in love. Please. That's been settled since the opening credits.

The real mystery is how this town manages to organize so many Christmas events without anyone having a full-time municipal employee whose only job is hanging mistletoe.