Christmas capers, a creepy clown and war-time stories: what we’re watching in December

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s Newsletters Academic rigour, journalistic flair Netflix, HBO, AppleTV, Stan, ABC, The Conversation Christmas capers, a creepy clown and war-time stories: what we’re watching in December Published: December 1, 2025 7.03pm GMT Alexa Scarlata, RMIT University, Alex Munt, University of Technology Sydney, Ari Mattes, University of Notre Dame Australia, Elliott Logan, Monash University, Erin Harrington, University of Canterbury, Jessica Gildersleeve, University of Southern Queensland, Liz Giuffre, University of Technology Sydney

Authors

1. Alexa Scarlata

   Lecturer, Digital Communication, RMIT University

2. Alex Munt

   Associate Professor, Media Arts & Production, University of Technology Sydney

3. Ari Mattes

   Lecturer in Communications and Media, University of Notre Dame Australia

4. Elliott Logan

   Lecturer in Film, Screen, and Culture, Monash University

5. Erin Harrington

   Senior Lecturer in English and Cultural Studies, University of Canterbury

6. Jessica Gildersleeve

   Professor of English Literature, University of Southern Queensland

7. Liz Giuffre

   Associate Professor in Media, University of Technology Sydney

Disclosure statement

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Monash University and University of Technology Sydney provide funding as founding partners of The Conversation AU.

RMIT University provides funding as a strategic partner of The Conversation AU.

University of Southern Queensland and University of Canterbury provide funding as members of The Conversation AU.

University of Canterbury provides funding as a member of The Conversation NZ.

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DOI

https://doi.org/10.64628/AA.msqgcgvqv

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From alien hive minds, to a Fremantle-based crime caper, and a festive heist, this month’s screen picks feature leading characters at their messiest and most spirited.

Vince Gilligan’s Plur1bus offers a darkly comic exploration of what makes us human (while tapping into our fears about AI). Or on a lighter note, we have two fresh entries to the Christmas movie genre – both with their own chaotic twist.

If you’re after something more local, there’s a new series exploring how art shapes our understanding of the wartime years or a crime show set under the blue skies of Western Australia. So grab a cuppa and get stuck in!

Reckless

SBS On Demand

When we meet them driving home from a family wedding late one night, it’s clear siblings Charlie (Hunter Page-Lochard) and June (Tasma Walton) already have a pretty dysfunctional relationship.

But things come to a head when Charlie accidentally hits and kills a man, and June insists they try and cover up the whole thing. They have too much to lose if they come clean, she argues. There’s really no choice but to act recklessly.

Other characters won’t let the siblings’ secret lie. One standout is the magnetic (and often hilarious) private investigator Roddy (Clarence Ryan), who has chosen this case to climb out of a drunken stupor and prove himself.

Written and executive produced by Kodie Bedford and directed by Beck Cole – both Indigenous creators – this four-part series purposefully leans into and succeeds in representing flawed and complicated contemporary First Nations characters.

I didn’t find myself hoping the siblings would get away with their crime, especially as they grew more desperate and foolish in their efforts to cover it up. Yet they are relatable. You can understand why June is so headstrong and defensive when you meet her wife Kate (Jane Harber), who is paranoid about past indiscretions and tracks June’s phone.

The series is also worth watching just for for the blue skies, local pubs and ocean views of Fremantle, a part of Australia we rarely get to see onscreen.

– Alexa Scarlata

Read more: Dodgy characters, dangerous twists: Reckless is the new crime series putting Freo on the map

After the Hunt

Prime Video

Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) is a queer, millennial, black woman (coded Gen-Z at times) who is portrayed to be at best a mediocre student or at worst a plagiarist. Her PhD supervisor and mentor, Alma (Julia Roberts), struggles with pressures of modern academia: teaching, publishing and campus politics. Her remedies are copious amounts of red wine and (illegal) pain prescription pills.

With tenure just in sight, Maggie files an accusation of sexual assault against Hank (Andrew Garfield), Alma’s close colleague and confidante. Generational conflict plays out on Yale’s Beinecke Library plaza where Alma calls out Maggie’s “accidental privilege” and performative modes of “discomfort” through a lens of identity politics.

But Maggie’s family are benefactors to Yale and, with dwindling government support, private philanthropy keeps the lights on. In these new campus films the university itself is a key character – and its traits are found wanting.

In After the Hunt, a new entry in the Dark Academia genre, the phrase “the crisis of higher education” – typically a news heading – is repurposed as character dialogue. The Dean tells Alma “optics” matter most.

While Agnes and Alma ultimately succeed in their tenure as professors, it feels a hollow victory.

– Alex Munt

Read more: 'Dark Academia' romanticises a gothic higher education aesthetic. The modern institution is ethically closer to grey

Jingle Bell Heist

Netflix

Jingle Bell Heist – one of the latest additions to the Netflix Christmas movie boom kicked off by likes of The Princess Switch (2018) and The Christmas Chronicles (2018) – holds its own against these other classics of the streaming era.

Its premise is interesting and original (but not too interesting and original, which can be a problem for a Christmas film). And it is sustained by a carefree, goofily upbeat tone that embraces the dagginess of the genre, with enough sentimentality to thaw the frostiest of hearts without inducing reflux.

Sophia (Olivia Holt) is a cheerful American shopgirl in an upmarket London department store frequented by the kinds of people who differentiate between types of cashmere. The store is owned by the crooked, Scrooge-like Mr Sterling (Peter Serafinowicz). Sophia doesn’t mind lifting cash from the odd wallet and moonlights as a bar wench, but all the hard work and larceny are for a good cause: her sick mother needs a bone marrow transplant sooner than the NHS waitlist will allow.

When tech-wiz Nick (Connor Swindells) – a criminal and father with a heart of gold – approaches her about knocking over Sterling’s personal safe, an entirely predictable, but nonetheless satisfying, string of events is set into motion. While it’s no Reindeer Games (2000), Jingle Bell Heist is surprisingly well-made. It’s an effectively low-key British Christmas caper comedy, with Holt delightful as the lead.

And if you dig a little deeper, it also explores the cost of living pressures people face in a neoliberal metropolis.

– Ari Mattes

Plur1bus

Apple TV

In Vince Gilligan’s new show, Plur1bus, an alien-made “virus” comes to Earth and begins to infect everyone. While the infected are physically untouched, they are stripped of emotion and individual consciousness. They become part of a single “hive mind”. (This plot might sound familiar if you’ve seen Don Siegel’s 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers).

In episode one we meet Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn), a cynical, alcoholic romance novelist living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. After an alien DNA sequence infects almost everyone on Earth, Carol ends up as one of 11 unaffected survivors in the whole world. The infected become entirely happy and helpful – seemingly harmless. Carol might be the last miserable person left alive.

Plur1bus almost asks to be read as allegory. Viewers have been quick to point out eerie similarities with concerns about artificial intelligence (AI). Gilligan packs the show with images of all human innerness and knowledge massed into a single entity. With the exception of Carol and some fellow survivors, every character is, in a sense, no character at all – just the outer appearance of an individual, behind which lies a fabricated synthesis of everyone else.

What does it mean to be moved by signs of feeling coming from a being that is not a person at all? What does it mean to outsource our expressions of self to an inhuman consciousness? What would we become?

Fortunately, with Plur1bus, we can appreciate a depth of inventive insight that remains, for now, only human.

– Elliott Logan

Read more: Vince Gilligan’s sci-fi series Plur1bus taps into our greatest fears about AI

IT: Welcome to Derry

HBO Max

It: Welcome to Derry is an entertaining and well-made prequel to Andy Muschietti’s recent two-part film adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 novel, which follows a group of friends as they attempt to defeat an evil cosmic entity that emerges every 27-ish years to feed off the fears of the people of Derry, Maine.

Like the original, It: Welcome to Derry focuses on a ragtag bunch of outsiders, played by some immensely talented young actors, as they try to understand and contain the evil. The show is clear in its tone and intentions, turning up the pastel-toned nostalgia of small-town America, circa 1960, to the point of near parody.

In contrast, real-world horrors swirl around the group: entrenched racism against Black and Indigenous Americans, Cold War paranoia, adolescent cruelty, isolation, and grief. We also get to see the films’ backstory fleshed out in a creative and satisfying manner.

Certain elements do feel a bit repetitive, drawing from a now-familiar playbook in streaming horror, such as the combination of the “kids on bikes” trope and period nostalgia.

Nonetheless, Muschietti’s more-is-more take on visceral horror set pieces means that some elements are genuinely unsettling. Pennywise the killer clown (played again by Bill Skarsgård) takes his time in showing up. While you wait, watch out for some wonderfully monstrous pickle jars (yes, that’s right) in episode two.

– Erin Harrington

A Merry Little Ex-Mas

Netflix

It’s always a delight to see Alicia Silverstone light up the screen. In Netflix’s latest Christmas offering, A Merry Little Ex-Mas, she brings both energy and gravitas to the role of Kate – recently divorced woman whose children are on the verge of adulthood, and who is ready to turn her back on an unfulfilling past and begin a new chapter.

Kate is frustrated about the sacrifices she’s had to make while her ex-husband, Everett (Oliver Hudson), pursued his career as a doctor. She is also resentful that Everett has already found a new love with the glamorous Tess (Jameela Jamil). But soon that frustration turns to jealousy, and Kate begins to long for the life she’s on the verge of giving up, with predictable “romantic” results.

Some of the funniest moments in the film come from the side characters: Everett’s dads who run a hardware store; Kate’s daughter’s boyfriend who loves Harry Potter a little too much; and Kate’s very handsome love interest, Chet, who works at the Christmas tree market.

But A Merry Little Ex-Mas does attempt a surprisingly feminist resolution: Kate (rather than Tess) reaps the benefits of Everett’s recognition of his past errors, and her fresh start, with Everett, begins to look more like the life she’d originally planned.

A Merry Little Ex-Mas is a surprisingly watchable and funny Christmas treat.

– Jessica Gildersleeve

When The War is Over

ABC iView

This five-part series from the ABC explores how art and war work together – or more importantly, what art has taught us about war. Hosted by actor and art enthusiast Rachel Griffiths, it is a beautiful and expectedly sad series, but the education it provides is vital. Covering Gallipoli, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Changi and the Australian Wars, the consistent theme, as Griffiths repeats, is about how “art serves as resistance”.

While there’s no need to watch the episodes in order, each one tends to draw you in to explore more. While much of the official histories of the events tend to be male-dominated, the series’ balanced inclusion of female artists and perspectives shows how art helps to uncover the depth of war’s impact, including families left behind, or those who lived with soldiers who returned home broken.

The episode on Vietnam unpacking the anthems “Khe Sanh” and “I Was Only 19” is particularly impactful, as is episode five on the Australian Wars and the continued presence of First Nations perspectives that have yet to be more widely understood.

While academics might see this as media studies 101, for general audiences it is a reminder of the value of popular arts in shaping how and what we know (or think we know) about war. As Griffiths says, these artists are “war heroes without weapons but with just imagination”.

– Liz Giuffre

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