Cookies By The Fire

The scouts

It's a competent dark-family-secret thriller that does exactly what it says on the tin—nothing here subverts the setup or makes me recalibrate what I think a Christmas-gone-wrong story can do.

Vasey demonstrates control over tone and pacing in service of a fairly familiar premise; the film knows its place in the lineage of domestic psychological drama, even if it doesn't extend or interrogate that tradition.

The restraint in the final reveal—letting the mother's reaction breathe in silence rather than punctuating it with music or explanation—is the decision that transforms what could be melodrama into something genuinely unsettling and human.