In the early scenes of this “bizarre comedy” from debut director Camille Griffin, we seem to be firmly in “Richard Curtis territory”, said Charlotte O’Sullivan in the London Evening Standard. Keira Knightley stars as Nell, a mother of three who is about to spend Christmas in a “holly bedecked mansion” in the English countryside “with her attractive, sweary and dysfunctional friends”, as well as her “once-doting” husband Simon (Matthew Goode). But as the film progresses, it becomes clear that Knightley and co. are eating, drinking and being merry because they’re facing the apocalypse: a cloud of poisonous gas is sweeping across the world; and to inhale it is to die an agonising death. The only protection from pain? “A government-sponsored suicide pill.” Audiences who went in expecting “cinematic eggnogg” may demand their money back.
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