It’s Christmas Eve and if The Holiday is one of your favourite festive movies of all time, then there’s a good chance you’ve just recently watched it.
For the uninitiated, it’s a festive rom-com where two women (Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz) decide to try a holiday house exchange and get away from their lives for a bit.
While Iris (Winslet) heads off to the US in an attempt to get over her ex-boyfriend Jasper (Rufus Sewell), American woman Amanda (Diaz) decides after being cheated on that she’ll venture across the Atlantic in the other direction.
Iris gets close to film composer Miles (Jack Black), while her brother Graham (Jude Law) strikes up a romance with Amanda.
Lots of other stuff happens from there and if you want to know the rest then you ought to watch the movie, but some fans of The Holiday have decided what this rom-com needs is a spooky theory to make viewers see things in a different light.
In the movie, Jude Law’s character is a widower who is raising two daughters he had with his wife, who is now conveniently deceased to leave the way clear for Amanda.
However, some fans wonder if perhaps Graham offed his wife ‘so he could inherit her house’, and think that Diaz’s character would be next on the proverbial chopping block.
The theory goes thusly: “He and his sister have used the house swap scheme to get Cameron Diaz into their town while Kate Winslet can investigate and make sure Cameron has enough money and property (and no family/entanglements) to be worth the effort of seducing her and then disposing of her.
“Kate is so overjoyed to see how grand and luxurious Cameron’s house is because she knows she and Jude have hit the jackpot.
“Meanwhile, Jude carefully sets up an ‘accidental’ meeting and manipulates Cameron to develop a relationship and get his claws into her.
“Everything that follows is orchestrated to carry out their plot.”
Merry Christmas guys, and a Happy New Year if you can make it that far without being murdered in a secret plot.
Yes, for some viewers their experience of watching The Holiday is enhanced by believing that Iris and Graham are secretly murderers who scope out single women looking for love and take their houses through a murder-marriage scheme.
If that’s what it takes to make The Holiday a better movie for you then all power to you, but that doesn’t seem to be what happens in the actual movie at all.
Instead, they all decide to spend the New Year together and the movie has a rather happy ending, it is supposed to be the season to be jolly after all, not a time for ho-ho-homicide.
In fairness to the theorists, there are plenty of rom-coms where the stuff the characters get up to is genuinely awful and dangerously illegal.
Meanwhile, if you really want the movie ruined then Jude Law later admitted that the idyllic cottage which features in the movie isn’t actually real, it turns out no home could be quite so perfect and the cottage interior was all sets.
