Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Flipping for Christmas’ on Hallmark, Which Is Light On Home Renovation, Heavy On Romance

Flipping for Christmas, Hallmark’s ninth holiday movie of 2023, aims to combine all the things people love about the network’s Countdown to Christmas and the countdown to a big home makeover reveal. Home renovation meets Hallmark holiday movie romance? What’s not to love? But is it possible to mix these two beloved formulas and create a hospitable space, or is this a match made in makeover hell?

FLIPPING FOR CHRISTMAS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Ashley Newbrough (Christmas for Keeps) plays Abigail, a millennial mogul with her own design firm. She has an assistant, okay? She’s doing great — and she’s poised to start doing even better now that she’s landed a major developer as a client. Even though Abigail won these big-timers over with her all-work/no-play attitude, she concedes that she does need to work remotely over the holidays so she can help her sister Claire (The Lake’s Natalie Lisinska) with a major, major home renovation debacle. Her husband’s grandfather passed away and left him a beautiful, if dusty, Victorian home. Claire and her husband need to get it fixed up and sold so they can afford to build an add-on to their home, now that Claire’s widower father is moving in with her.

As if landing a major new client, renovating a house, and juggling work over the holidays wasn’t enough, Abigail also has to contend with the other person in the grandfather’s will: Bo (Ride’s Marcus Rosner), a local contractor who wants to turn the old house into a bed and breakfast that will benefit the entire community. But Abigail won’t back down because she knows what they can get for a renovated Victorian house in this town. Abigail had her assistant look into it… and she also maybe let it slip to her overeager assistant that there’s a massive, 90-acre lot in town that’s for sale, just waiting to be developed. Eh, whatever — it’s not like there’s a greedy, capitalistic developer who salivates over the notion of gentrification that Abigail’s assistant could reach out to. Oh wait…

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Remember last year’s low-key bizarre slate of holiday original movies on Discovery+? The ones that included extended, Property Brothers-style animation of walls being knocked out as well as cameos from HGTV stars? Flipping for Christmas is a much more balanced version of those, with way more reliance on the holiday tropes than the home reno show ones.

Performance Worth Watching: Natalie Lisinska is a real delight as Abigail’s sister, a married mom who has learned how to relinquish control of her life — in a good way. She’s not a stressed-out control freak like she used to be, and her monologue about how upsetting it is to try to control the uncontrollable aspects of life is well done. She also gets all the best lines, like the one she says about her father: “I love him to death but sometimes I could love him to death.” She has big Jocelyn from Schitt’s Creek energy.

Memorable Dialogue: Bo’s own piece of small-town wisdom: “The brighter the skyline, the dimmer the stars.”

A Holiday Tradition: Okay, I’m all for Claire’s relaxed mental state, but she says that her family opens all of their Christmas presents at once in a six-minute wrapping paper “tsunami.” This is monstrous. I’d rather eat one of Brenbury’s upsetting seasonal delicacies, a hot dog with cranberry sauce, than speed through Christmas morning like that. And because Bo is a woodworker in a Hallmark holiday movie, of course he plays the part of “Santa’s associate” and takes requests for hand-carved goods from the town, which he has ready to be picked up on Christmas Eve.

Does the Title Make Any Sense?: In the most literal sense, sure. Abigail and Bo are flipping a house. However, I wish this title was instead used for a movie about an Olympic gymnastics hopeful who returns to her small town and falls for the owner of a local gym.

Our Take: As far afield as some Hallmark movie premises are straying lately, Flipping for Christmas is one movie that offers reassurance to those who like their Hallmark movies the way they’ve always been. If you want to see a movie about a successful business lady going back home for the holidays only to be thrown into a merry situation with a gruff man who works with his hands, Flipping for Christmas is absolutely for you — and it even has solid character work and a few LOL moments, to boot.

Because Flipping for Christmas adheres so closely to the old-fashioned formula, the parts where it deviates from the path or emphasizes certain aspects stand out more. For one, it’s an interesting touch making Brenbury the hometown of Abigail’s brother-in-law, a town that Abigail’s sister moved to and where their father has moved following the recent death of their mother. So many Hallmark movies make the small town the protagonist’s hometown, we forget that a lot of people spend the holidays somewhere completely different. And it even, perhaps inadvertently, says something about Abigail’s character that she would rally around protecting a town that she has no roots in from gentrification. And the movie absolutely treats gentrification as something that needs to be stopped. The phrase “box stores” is said with such disdain, it may as well be a curse.

The only area where Flipping for Christmas falls short has to be the home reno part — the part that last year’s lineup of experimental home reno/holiday movies overdid. Unfortunately, the home renovation aspect of the movie is relegated to a montage, a few scenes, a paint fight, and a soft reveal that doesn’t get the excitement of a “move that bus” moment. The set used for the Victorian house didn’t get a renovation so much as a new coat of paint. That’s a shame because there are so many emotions, story beats, and conflicts inherent to house flipping that it really would make for a strong backbone for a holiday romance… if production can navigate the continuity headaches of filming a movie in a home that’s also undergoing massive renovation. It could be done, and I’m still waiting to see it!

Our Call: STREAM IT, just be warned that there’s not that much house-flipping in Flipping for Christmas.