In a small town in Oregon, Jen runs Jen.uine, a design business specializing in clothing restoration. Needing some publicity and encouraged by her sister and business partner Ali, Jen enters a social media contest on the Hygge at Home podcast to find a hot new design influencer. With help from her incredibly handsome platonic best friend Max, a photographer, Jen and Ali make a video featuring a fake persona, claiming to have a husband (Max) and a new baby (Ali's new baby). The contest's judges, married couple Charlie and Zoe, choose her as one of the finalists and spring a surprise on her: they're coming to Oregon to spend a couple of days with her. Panicked, Jen gets Max and Ali to play along to present a picture of domestic bliss. Of course, things start to snowball from there: she gets thousands of new followers who want to see her life unfold; her mother, ecstatic that Jen has married her best friend, comes to spend Christmas with her; and long-buried feelings between Jen and Max, who briefly dated many years ago, come to the surface. But we soon learn that Jen isn't the only faker: Charlie and Zoe are secretly separated and contemplating a divorce. Will Christmas day bring happy endings for all? As Hallmark Christmas movies go, this is about par for the course. The pluses: it’s a fairly clever reworking of the classic film Christmas in Connecticut (with social media standing in for a magazine), right down to the borrowed baby; Brant Daugherty (Max, pictured) always improves a movie; the actress playing Ali, Anna Van Hooft, is a breath of fresh air and needs her own Christmas movie to shine in; the Hygge couple's plotline is good. The minuses: Clare Bowen (Jen) is a little disappointing, partly because she's too whiny and teary; the Christmas element is not highlighted enough—this could have been set at any time of year; the ending feels a bit rushed. This has a rating of 6 out of 10 on IMDb and that feels right. But Brant makes it worth watching. [Hallmark]
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