Hallmark
Rating: 🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄
Description: Sally (DeLoach), an art teacher, has spent the last 10 years honoring the memory of her late husband Jake while raising their children, Keegan (Brandon Ironside) and Boo (Remy Marthaller). Feeling like she’s finally ready for love, she joins a dating app and is matched with Damon (Di Pace), her former colleague who taught her kids’ kindergarten class. Jake had co-founded a web platform that preserved family home videos. When a server migration wipes out Sally’s treasured videos of him – and her phone containing backup copies accidentally shatters – the only hope is finding the original tapes. She doesn’t want Keegan and Boo to know about the missing videos so to buy time until they’re recovered, Sally institutes a screen-free Christmas for her family while secretly searching for the tapes. After she connects with Damon at his uncle’s antique store, he joins the hunt and the two grow closer. Keegan and Boo soon discover the joys of unplugging and spending quality time with their grandparents, who also come around and embrace the experiment after begrudgingly agreeing. With every lead exhausted, Sally is forced to admit the videos may be gone forever. As the fate of the tapes is in flux, the family learns the importance of cherishing old memories and creating new ones. Starring Nikki DeLoach and Juan Pablo Di Pace.
Overall Review: Hallmark, this is more like it.
After what feels like an endless parade of perfectly average Christmas movies this season, Holiday Unplugged reminded me why I keep watching these things in the first place. Five trees. No hesitation. This movie had me from the beginning. I was invested in the characters and genuinely interested in where the story was going. When I first heard the premise of a family spending Christmas without their phones, I was prepared to roll my eyes so hard they might not come back. I assumed the movie would be about a frustrated mother who decides her children spend too much time staring at screens and forces everyone to rediscover the magic of human connection.
That’s not what this movie was doing.
As the real motivation behind the phone-free Christmas became clear, the story took on an entirely different level of meaning. What initially sounded like a tired lecture about screen time turned into something with genuine emotional depth–the decision wasn’t simply about putting devices away. There was a much more compelling reason behind it, and that changed everything about how I experienced the story.
It’s rare for a Christmas movie to take a premise that initially makes me skeptical and then completely win me over with the way it develops that idea. But Holiday Unplugged did exactly that. It gave the characters something meaningful to work through and it let it all unfold.
Now, was the romantic chemistry between Nikki DeLoach and Juan Pablo Di Pace the greatest I’ve ever seen? No. There have certainly been Hallmark couples who made me believe in their romance a little more convincingly. But here’s the thing: I didn’t care. The story was so engaging, and the emotional stakes were so compelling, that the chemistry became a secondary concern. I was too busy being invested in what was happening.
Perhaps the greatest compliment I can give a movie about putting down your phone? I never once wanted to pick mine up.
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