This New Holiday Rom-Com Officially Flips the Christmas Movie Formula

It seems like Halloween was just last weekend (because it was), but that means we’re now barreling forward to Christmas. And that means it’s time for holiday romantic comedies, like A Very Merry Breakup. However, as the title might imply, this isn’t your ordinary “hard-working city gal meets small-town hunk” kind of movie. Collider is proud to exclusively present a preview sneak peek from A Very Merry Breakup to celebrate its digital release today.

The film is written and directed by Elizabeth Guest (See You Next Christmas); it’s a feature-length expansion of her acclaimed web series, Guest Appearances. She also stars as Lydia, a commitment-phobic love addict who has a seemingly perfect boyfriend in the form of Tim (Andrew Leeds, Ghosts). He’s handsome, he’s reliable, and he pops the question to her in a picture-perfect Christmas-time proposal straight out of a movie. Naturally, she immediately freaks out and flies across the country to see her parents, who try to set her up with every eligible bachelor they know.

Our sneak peek sees the start of that visit: Lydia arrives in Los Angeles unexpectedly to see her parents, who are planning to fly out to see her. She drops in for some advice from all four of them, played by Nicholas Guest (National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation), Pamela Guest (Airplane II: The Sequel), Ed Begley Jr. (Better Call Saul), and Rachelle Carson-Begley (Cobra Kai). They’re a little puzzled by her cross-continental flight from romance, especially after she lets them know that the two of them followed up his proposal by watching the greatest Christmas movie ever made, It’s a Wonderful Life. Their confusion deepens after she gives them their Christmas gifts, which Tim picked out; naturally, they’re all perfectly thoughtful. Can Lydia salvage this relationship, or is perfection not what she’s looking for? You’ll have to book a holiday date with A Very Merry Breakup, which is now available digitally on Apple TV, Fandango at Home and Prime Video.

Four love stories, four completely different ideas of what it means to
be somebody’s person. This is the one that matches how you actually fall, and what it would ask of
you.

You do not fall for strangers. You fall for the person you have
already been talking to for years, which is the slowest and by some distance the most
durable way anybody has found to do this.

• When Harry Met Sally made the case that the best romance is an argument you enjoy,
  conducted over a decade, by two people refusing to admit what is happening.
• You want to be known rather than swept away. Somebody who remembers your worst story is
  doing better work than anybody arriving with flowers.
• The film is unusually honest about timing. These two are wrong for each other repeatedly
  until suddenly they are not, and neither of them engineered it.
• You would still be talking about everything at eighty. That is the entire promise.

You want a partner, not an audience. Somebody who wants their own
life as badly as you want yours, and who would never ask you to be smaller to make the
relationship easier.

• This is the rare romance where both people have a real career and the film takes both of
  them equally seriously.
• You would rather be pushed than protected. The right person for you is also a bit of a
  rival, and that never entirely goes away.
• It understands the actual problem in ambitious relationships. Not whether you love each
  other, but whose turn it is this year.
• You would still be competing at forty. That is how you would know it was working.

The intensity was never the problem. The secrecy is. You are
drawn to a love that lives entirely in private, and to the particular ache of wanting
somebody you are not supposed to want.

• Heated Rivalry runs on the oldest engine in romance: two people on opposite sides,
  meeting in secret, getting far more attached than either of them planned.
• You keep your private life genuinely private, and something in you finds hidden things
  more real than public ones.
• The tension is not only between the two of them. It is between what they have and what
  it would cost either one to say it out loud.
• Years of this, and the whole story is really about whether either of them will finally
  stop hiding.

You do not do this cautiously. When it happens for you it is
immediate and total and it rearranges everything, and you would not accept a smaller version
of it.

• Titanic gave us the biggest romance in film history and then made it last about five
  days, which is precisely the point of it.
• You measure love by intensity rather than duration. A few days of the real thing beats
  decades of something merely comfortable.
• The film is not only about the romance. It is about a woman who went on to live an
  enormous life afterwards because of it.
• You would still be telling this story at a hundred years old, and telling it exactly the
  same way.

Was the Making of ‘A Very Merry Breakup’ a Family Affair?

Elizabeth Guest has deep roots in filmmaking; her parents are Nicholas and Pamela Guest, both of whom star in the film; her aunt and uncle are mockumentarian Christopher Guest and Oscar-winner Jamie Lee Curtis. Meanwhile, her other parents in the film are played by real-life Hollywood couple Ed Begley Jr. and Rachelle Carson-Begley. Noted sibling actors Keith Carradine and Robert Carradine also star in the movie; Robert died earlier this year, and the film is dedicated to his memory.

A Very Merry Breakup is now available digitally on Apple TV, Fandango at Home, and Prime Video. Stay tuned to Collider for future updates.