TL;DR: Jingle Bell Heist won’t change the holiday rom-com landscape, but its mix of soft crime caper charm, likable leads, and unexpectedly classy visuals makes it a cozy seasonal watch. Light, amusing, mildly twisty, and blessed with a villain’s downfall that hits like hot cocoa for the soul, it’s the rare Netflix holiday movie you won’t regret pressing play on.
Jingle Bell Heist
Every December, Netflix launches another volley of holiday movies directly at our dopamine receptors, hoping at least one will become the next big comfort rewatch. Most miss. A few land just soft enough to nap through. And then once in a while you get something like Jingle Bell Heist, which doesn’t try to be a classic at all — it just wants to slide across your screen like a peppermint-scented Ocean’s Eleven knockoff with a shy heart and a crooked Santa hat. And you know what? I didn’t mind it.
Directed and shot by Michael Fimognari, who you probably know as Mike Flanagan’s go-to visual sorcerer, this one has more polish than it deserves, a pace that goes down easy, and just enough caper energy to hide the fact that the whole thing is basically held together by the cinematic equivalent of holiday Scotch tape. But as someone who consumes seasonal streaming movies like they’re gaming loot boxes — hoping for treasure, accepting trash — I found myself surprisingly charmed by this festive mash of crime, romance, and light moral disobedience.
Funnily enough, the movie opens not with snowflakes or Mariah Carey-friendly vibes but a heist already in motion. Our leads Sophie (Olivia Holt) and Nick (Connor Swindells) are mid-operation on Christmas Eve, skulking through a department store like the ghosts of capitalism past. Before we know what they’re stealing or why, the film yanks us backward two weeks, which I immediately read as a promise: buckle up, this movie is going to try to be clever.
Normally, Christmas rom-coms don’t go for non-linear structure. Most can barely handle linear structure. So even though the flashback setup is simple, I appreciated the gesture. It felt like the film whispering trust me, we’re trying.
The rewind introduces us to Sophie, fresh from Philadelphia and now in London primarily because the U.K. will treat her mother’s illness without bankrupting her. It’s the first time I’ve seen free healthcare used as a plot motivator in a holiday movie, and honestly, it plays better than destiny or Christmas magic. Sophie works days at Sterling’s Department Store, which is exactly the sort of retail palace where the words holiday cheer mean mandatory overtime and customers behaving like end-stage Bond villains. Her co-workers are decent humans. Her boss, Maxwell Sterling (Peter Serafinowicz), is not. He’s the kind of corporate aristocrat whose handshake probably feels like a frozen fish.
Sophie herself is a petty-thief-with-a-heart-of-gold type, stealing from grumps to give to buskers. She’s basically Christmas Catwoman, if Catwoman spent her nights crying into a pub apron. But Holt plays her with such warm-blooded earnestness that you root for her almost instantly.
Across town, Nick is dealing with his own Scrooge-shaped storm cloud. Recently out of prison for stealing from Sterling’s — a crime we eventually learn he was framed for, because of course — he’s crashing at his friend’s place and fixing electronics for cash. He’s still bitter enough to monitor Sterling’s security cameras, which is how he catches Sophie performing a slick little five-finger discount on a terrible customer. He decides to blackmail her into joining a revenge heist, but Sophie refuses until her mother’s worsening condition forces her to rethink the moral math.
Some people will call this contrived. They’re correct. I call it genre-appropriate. Christmas heists need contrivance the way gingerbread needs cloves.
Once Nick and Sophie team up, the movie slides into a breezy rhythm of playful scheming, easy banter, and caper-lite misadventures. She brings sleight-of-hand finesse learned from a rogue magician grandfather; he brings brooding tech-guy competence and the kind of awkward charm that suggests he apologises to microwaves. Their chemistry doesn’t exactly spark like a holiday fairground ride — it’s more slow ember than bright flame — but there’s something endearing about watching two slightly broken people learning to trust each other through moderately illegal activities.
Part of the fun comes from the movie’s willingness to let its leads look ridiculous. Their undercover attempts involve Santa-themed role-play, art-gala cringe, and enough goofy improvising to make you wonder if they practiced the heist or just skimmed a Reddit thread on social engineering. When Nick accidentally seduces Maxwell’s wife Cynthia (Lucy Punch), I nearly spit out my hot chocolate. She’s spectacularly done with her husband’s nonsense and delighted to help screw him over. Punch plays her like a holiday-season Lady Macbeth with better lighting.
The thing is, none of this would work if Fimognari didn’t commit visually. Instead of the blinding LED glow most Christmas movies use to fake cheer, he opts for a richer, burnished palette — warm shadows, soft London night textures, and interiors that look like they belong in a stylish heist thriller rather than a twee rom-com. His camera even delivers a couple of cheeky zooms, as if it, too, wants in on the joke. I never expected the director of Haunting of Hill House to pivot into festive crime fluff, but he brings just enough technical swagger to lift the entire film.
And the soundtrack? It’s one of those chaotic holiday playlists where you’ve got Run-DMC rubbing elbows with indie rockers Low, sandwiched between whatever seasonal licenses Netflix had lying around. Steve Hackman’s score leans into antic energy, occasionally veering into cartoon caper territory, but it fits the vibe — slightly silly, slightly mischievous, ultimately cozy.
The movie only stumbles when it tries too hard to ignite the romance angle. Holt and Swindells are both likable, but their chemistry rarely rises beyond warm companionship. It’s more we-are-trauma-linked coworkers than star-crossed lovers, and the script doesn’t do enough to push their dynamic past occasional flirting and long looks over security monitors. But to be fair, the romance is almost secondary. What the audience really wants — and what the film wisely gives — is Maxwell Sterling’s overdue comeuppance.
And the finale delivers it with gusto. After a charmingly messy buildup full of disguises, gadget tinkering, and near-disasters, the climactic heist sequence gathers all the narrative threads into a satisfyingly tidy bow. The payoff isn’t a kiss; it’s a corporate tyrant publicly imploding. The movie understands the true meaning of Christmas: making sure the villain suffers deliciously.
Jingle Bell Heist isn’t destined to become an annual holiday classic. It’s not ambitious enough, or emotionally sweeping enough, or weird enough to carve its name into the seasonal vault next to Elf or The Holiday. But it’s a genuinely pleasant two-hour diversion — a warm mug of festive spiced crime with just enough personality to justify its existence in Netflix’s endless tinsel-covered content buffet.
I didn’t walk away transformed. I walked away entertained. And in the season of maximum sugar and minimum patience, that’s worth something.
