Hallmark Channel
Hallmark kicked off its ‘Merry Thanksgiving’ weekend with a romantic drama that felt a bit reminiscent of last year’s Our Holiday Story, although instead of the couple telling their children how the romance started, we get to see the story they will eventually tell their children.
On an unexpected layover in mid-December, Annie Lane (Autumn Reeser) and Dave Weeks (Niall Matter) meet as strangers in a beautiful hotel — they lucked out and ended up in a luxury hotel as the airport hotels were all booked — all decorated for the holidays. It’s love at first sight, and they end up having a magical night of sharing hopes, dreams … and a perfect kiss. But when they fail to exchange numbers and miss each other the next morning, Annie and Dave fly back to Chicago with no easy way to track the other one down. The only clues they have are those shared about plans for the upcoming holiday season, and the two embark on separate quests to find one another. Along the way, insightful wisdom shared during their time together leads Annie and Dave to make important changes in their lives, leading them both to find ways of making this Christmas special for themselves, their families, and their loved ones.
Hearing the title We Met in December really makes you think that the couple the story centers around have been together for years now and are telling others — kids, grandkids, friends at a party — how they met, but what we get is a story that sort of starts in the middle as Annie and Dave (no, not the member of Eurythmics), end a night together with plans to meet up the next morning for their flight home. It isn’t clear exactly what happened to get them to that point, yet, but the fact that they are in separate rooms in separate parts of the hotel tells us they just met. The story then flashes forward and backward as the two are back in Chicago pining for each other, then we learn that Dave overslept and missed his flight … and neither of them swapped numbers or even last names. Now Annie is looking for a needle in a haystack trying to find a Dave in finance, while Dave is trying to find a lawyer named Annie … while wondering what Annie is short for (and it’s not what you might ever think). Side note: he could have really narrowed down his search if he remembered that she said her job was fashion-adjacent, so why not start with fashion designers in Chicago? But throughout the movie, each one of them would remember a key moment of the other’s life — shown in flashbacks as they spend their night at the hotel doing a dessert tasting and helping the beleaguered employee finish decorating a tree — and then putting that memory to use by going to a specific place, like a hot chocolate shop or a children’s holiday performance, often crossing paths without realizing the other was there. Annie even signs up for an app to help find lost loves, hoping the people of Chicago can guide her to Dave, while Dave considers hiring a private investigator. False leads begin to discourage them, but along the way Annie learns Dave has inspired her to go back to her passion of fashion designing, while Dave realizes he needs to slow down and be more present with his family, especially since this is the first Christmas without his dad. As Christmas approaches, Dave has one more option to find Annie or he may throw in the towel — he needs to find a church where they sing ‘Silent Night’ by candlelight during the Christmas Eve service. So will Dave and Annie actually have a story to tell anyone?
Hallmark Channel
The plot structure of We Met in December really does harken back to Our Holiday Story as it flashes back and forth in time, and the screenplay by Nina Weinman is clever enough to lay out all of the clues for Dave and Annie to follow back in Chicago like Hansel & Gretel’s breadcrumbs. There are some nice moments of tension that occur when they are both in the same place at the same time but just miss each other, while a lot of the things they remember just depend on fate, like Dave going to Annie’s favorite hot chocolate shop on a whim. What are the odds she’d just show up at the same time? Thankfully, the movie does not go to such unbelievable lengths, and the times they do unknowingly cross paths actually make sense. The biggest problem with the movie, though, is that even at 84 minute (minus commercials) it still feels like it goes on forever, perhaps because there are just too many ‘he said he went here’ and ‘she said she went there’ scenes that keep Dave and Annie apart for far too long, requiring the story to then focus on Annie’s fashion design dreams and Dave’s family, including his sister’s boyfriend who Dave seems to be keeping at arm’s length, causing some strain between he and his sister. Of course these moments are meant to give Dave and Annie more character development, but it just begins to make things feel tedious.
The cast, however, do the work. Autumn Reeser makes for a fine Annie, a total professional who for the first time is a little out of her element because of how she feels about Dave after just one night. She makes it believable enough that this woman who has never strayed outside of her box is now smitten with someone she barely knows to the point of doing almost anything to find him. Niall Matter has a more complicated character in Dave, exuding all the charm in the world in the scenes with Annie, while also being a bit chaotic and controlling in his every day life, over-compensating for the loss of his father, trying to give his family a Christmas like dad did, going completely overboard with the outdoor decorations, and really stepping on some toes when he takes it upon himself to get a Christmas tree when the plan was they would all go together. Both actors allow their characters to grow through their performances, and when we do seem them together in the flashbacks they honestly have some nice chemistry, helping move the story along while also making us want them to get together as quickly as possible.
Of the supporting cast, Kyana Teresa is a stand-out as Annie’s BFF Kate, always encouraging Annie to get out there and find Dave, while also supporting her decision to start sketching her designs again and build up the confidence to ask her boss to be her mentor. Teresa always has a smile on her face, and comes off as the friend anyone would be privileged to have in their life. Everyone else in the main supporting cast, including Isabelle Boulton as Annie’s sister Beth, Tara Yelland as Dave’s sister Violet, Nora Sheehan as Dave’s mom Gail, David Pinard as Violet’s boyfriend Brady, and Laura Amersey and Adam Fawns as Dave’s friends Oliva and Jeff, all make their characters feel like authentic parts of Dave and Annie’s lives, written well so that no one ever tries to discourage them from their quest.
All in all, We Met in December is a pleasant enough romance movie, it just needed a little kick in the pants to make it feel less of a chore to sit through.
We Met in December has a run time of 1 hour 24 minutes, is rated TV G, and is streaming on Hallmark+.
Preview – We Met in December
Hallmark Channel
Listen to The Christmas Waltz by Laufey featured in We Met in December