Fantasia 2024 Review: CARNAGE FOR CHRISTMAS, A Plucky Podcaster Hunts A Serial Killer In Her Hometown

A true crime podcaster heading home for Christmas finds herself in the middle of a murder spree that she has to solve before she becomes the next victim in Alice Maio Mackay’s Carnage for Christmas. Mackay’s latest feature marks her first entry into the fertile ground that is holiday horror. Though the film veers more toward the classic detective story for much of its frenetic seventy-minute runtime, Carnage for Christmas never skimps on the gore when it’s time for the axe to fall. These competing tones make for a somewhat uneven film, but the film is still an undeniable leap forward for the filmmaker who already has numerous features under her belt at the tender age of nineteen.

Twenty-something trans true-crime buff Lola (Jeremy Moineau) is heading back to her hometown for the first time since transitioning and she’s understandably anxious. When she left her small hamlet several years before, there was no queer presence to speak of, at least not one that was out and proud. But it’s Christmas, and she wants to be with her sister, Danielle (Dominique Booth), so she takes the chance.

Lola’s podcast has taken off, and it turns out she’s something of a celebrity back home, a town she barely recognizes. There’s now a gay nightclub owned by her former high school teacher, now a drag queen, the local filling station serves artisanal coffee, and everyone just seems pretty cool about things. Until they’re not.

When an old friend of Lola’s turns up dead, the rhetoric starts to get savage. The victim is characterized by the local news and townsfolk as a lesbian homewrecker, who has destroyed marriages, and probably deserved what she got. The cops put it down to a robbery gone wrong, but there’s a stink to this case that Lola can’t ignore. She and her friends from back in the day band together to try and figure it out as people connected to Lola continue to drop like flies. It looks like the old urban legend of The Toymaker, a serial killer that inspired Lola’s podcast in the first place, is back to haunt the town, and Lola is the only one capable of putting together the pieces before it’s too late.

Alice Maio Mackay has created an incredible body of work in a very short time, and she’s getting better with each film. There aren’t a lot of nineteen-year-old trans filmmakers with her CV, and she’s definitely building her skills with each one. While some of her earlier work has a definite lo-fi chaotic energy to it, it hasn’t been as well put together as it could have, relying pretty heavily on dialogue that at times feels a bit too much like it was written by a teenager – I know, I know. Carnage for Christmas shows a quantum leap in maturity for both the writing and storytelling, incorporating Mackay’s unique point of view into a story that has the potential to appeal to a wider audience.

The film’s seventy-minute runtime is both a blessing and a curse. In an age where every film feels like it’s three hours long, it’s a breath of fresh air when something comes along with a bit of urgency to it’s narrative. However, the compressed timeline occasionally leads to dialogue becoming overly expository rather than finding a more cinematic way to deliver plot, an extra ten or fifteen minutes of “show don’t tell” wouldn’t have hurt here, but I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. That being said, the editing by The People’s Joker’s Vera Drew is exceptionally punchy, which definitely helped Mackay craft a more mature feeling film.

It’s a rare thing to have a filmmaker whose complete evolution happens on the screen, and Mackay’s journey has been exactly that. She’s a director with a lot to say, and with Carnage for Christmas it feels like she’s ready to start reaching outside of her core audience to maybe get attention from a broader swath of film fans. After watching her film T-Blockers at Fantasia last year, I was left more intrigued than satisfied and while it didn’t really work for me, I found myself eager to see what she’d make next. Well, it seems that Alice Maio Mackay may have reached the tipping point where her films can find that boarder audience without sacrificing the edge that makes them unique, and Carnage for Christmas is evidence that she’s just going to keep getting better.