Behind foggy windows, London prepares for Christmas. The fireplaces are lit, the tables set, the streets immersed in the cold of the Victorian winter. Then, in the silence of a room, you hear the sound of a chain being dragged across the floor. The celebration gives way to fear. After all, before becoming one of the most beloved Christmas stories of all time, The Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens was also a ghost story.
Ti West seems to want to start right here. The director of X, Pearl And MaXXXine he takes Ebenezer Scrooge, gives him the face of Johnny Depp and restores to Victorian London a darkness that the many film adaptations have progressively softened. The result is a beautiful film, visually very rich, with a protagonist who seems born for this role. But it’s not a masterpiece. Because in recovering the horror, West ends up sacrificing something equally important: that fairy-tale, almost domestic dimension that made Dickens’ Christmas a place to return to, year after year.
Dickens’ Christmas, between fairy tale and horror
In the collective imagination, A Christmas Carol it’s now a story cozy. One of those to watch again during the holidays, possibly under a blanket, while it’s cold outside and Christmas is approaching. Yet, in the story published in 1843, death is a constant presence, poverty is a condemnation and the protagonist is dragged through a supernatural journey that is much more like a nightmare than a dream.
West’s merit is that he recognized this profoundly Gothic nature without trying to superimpose a foreign language on Dickens. The director works on shadows, apparitions and the physical dimension of spirits, transforming Scrooge’s night into a journey crossed by disturbing images. Victorian London is reconstructed with great attention, among dark environments, elaborate costumes and photography that conveys all the harshness of a world in which social inequalities are an integral part of the landscape.
West knows how to build fear and, more importantly, how to make it visually interesting. The problem is that this choice ends up imposing itself on the rest.
The Christmas carol it works precisely because darkness and light coexist. Scrooge’s cold house exists in contrast to the warmth of other houses, his solitude acquires meaning through the happiness of others, the fear of death becomes bearable only when it leaves room for the possibility of a different life. Christmas is not simply the backdrop to the story: it is the point of comparison through which to measure everything that the protagonist has lost.
In Ebenezerhowever, the horror component ends up taking away space from the fairytale one. Not because the film is overly scary. Indeed, West seems aware of having to keep the story accessible even to a relatively young audience and never completely crosses the boundaries of dark fantasy. But the insistence on macabre atmospheres reduces that feeling of wonder that should accompany, and not just conclude, Scrooge’s journey.
The result is an elegant, evocative, sometimes spectacular Gothic, but not always as emotionally effective. As if the director was more interested in showing how terrifying Christmas Eve can be than in reminding us why it is worth wishing for the morning to come.
Johnny Depp, a perfect character actor for Ebenezer Scrooge
Johnny Depp is probably one of the most natural choices Hollywood could make to play Ebenezer Scrooge. Not for a question of resemblance to the literary character, but for that particular ability to give life to eccentric, grotesque, often unpleasant figures and almost always characterized by a profound loneliness.
Depp is a character actor in the truest sense of the word. An actor who builds his characters through his body even before words. A posture, a movement of the hands, a grimace, an inflection of the voice can tell more than an entire joke. It is a quality that runs through his filmography, from Edward Scissorhands to Jack Sparrow, and which also explains why he was able to inhabit Tim Burton’s cinematic universes so naturally.
His Scrooge is magnificently grouchy. A man who seems to have turned his dislike into a daily discipline, using money, sarcasm and contempt as tools to keep others at a distance. Depp restores its avarice without giving up a certain theatricality, accentuating its caricatural aspects and allowing the fragility that hides behind such obstinacy to emerge, when necessary.
The performance is excellent. But it has a limit, and it’s almost a paradox: Scrooge is such a perfect character for Depp that it doesn’t really force him to reinvent himself.
Many of the elements that made the actor famous are found. The taste for eccentricity, the attention to physical detail, the pleasure of making even a simple reaction memorable. Everything works, everything is calibrated, but little surprises. Depp magnificently interprets a character that already belongs, in many ways, to his cinematic imagination.
And perhaps this is precisely why the most successful moment comes when he stops being the Scrooge we expect.
Christmas morning and the joy of still having time
The awakening scene, after the visit of the three spirits, is one of the best-known passages in Christmas literature. Scrooge opens his eyes, realizes he is still in his room, and discovers that it is morning. It’s Christmas. The terrible vision of the future did not come true. He still has the chance to change things.
Johnny Depp finds here one of the most beautiful nuances of his interpretation.
The malice, the cynicism, the grimaces and even the theatricality that accompanies him for a good part of the film suddenly seem to dissolve. In their place appears an almost childish, uncontrollable joy, accompanied by the amazement of those who cannot believe they have received such a great gift.
It’s not simply the happiness of having survived. It is something more precise and universal: the discovery that you still have time.
Time to apologize, to make up for mistakes, to love someone, to be a different person. Time to do all those things that Scrooge had progressively excluded from his existence, convincing himself that they had no value.
It is in this sequence that Depp recalls why he is such a beloved performer. His ability to transform a simple emotion into an explosion of gestures, expressions and small movements restores to the character a vitality that until then had remained suffocated. And it is a contagious happiness, the kind that cinema manages to convey even when the spectator knows perfectly well what is about to happen.
For a few moments it no longer matters how many times this story has been told. It doesn’t even matter how predictable the happy ending is. Scrooge is happy, and that happiness is enough.
It is also the moment in which the film finally finds its fairy-tale dimension again. The horror retreats, the shadows lose importance, and all that remains is a man given another chance.
A story that doesn’t need to get darker, but to be told differently
Returnable Ebenezer The quality of the production is therefore not less memorable than it could have been. West is a capable director, the packaging is careful and the cast, which also includes Ian McKellen, Rupert Grint, Daisy Ridley, Sam Claflin and Andrea Riseborough, helps to give solidity to a narrative world that is recognizable from the first moment.
The limit rather concerns the ambition of the adaptation.
Tell again A Christmas Carol it means dealing with a story that the public knows almost by heart. It’s not enough to change the atmosphere to make it truly new. And it’s not even enough to entrust it to a great actor, especially when that role seems constructed to enhance the interpretative characteristics that have always belonged to him.
West intervenes on aesthetics more than he does on substance. His reinterpretation is darker, more disturbing, closer to horror cinema than many familiar versions of the classic, but remains essentially faithful to the original narrative path. Ghosts arrive, lessons are taught, conscience is awakened, and redemption is accomplished.
It’s not necessarily a flaw. Dickens’ text possesses such strength that it does not require upheavals to continue to function. But it is precisely this fidelity that makes the distance between the visual sophistication of the film and the relative predictability of its narrative construction even more evident.
The social dimension of the story could also have offered more space for in-depth analysis. Scrooge is not just a man who hates Christmas: he is the expression of a society in which wealth becomes a measure of individual value and poverty is considered the responsibility of those who suffer it. Dickens wrote a ghost story, but also an indictment of indifference. A question that, almost two centuries later, retains a surprising relevance.
The film does not ignore this component, but its true personality continues to emerge above all from the visual and supernatural dimension.
A good Christmas movie, but not the definitive one
Ebenezer it remains a film worth seeing. For the beauty of the Victorian reconstruction, for Ti West’s ability to recover the gothic soul of Dickens and, above all, for Johnny Depp, who returns to demonstrate how much he knows how to make a character irresistible even when he moves within familiar interpretative coordinates.
It’s a film that has atmosphere, craft and moments of genuine emotion. But he lacks that spark capable of transforming a good transposition into a version destined to establish itself in the collective imagination.
Maybe because The Christmas Carol it was never just a story about the fear of death or the consequences of a selfish existence. It is, first of all, a story about the possibility of being happy. And it is this nature of his, both gothic and fairy-tale, cruel and profoundly comforting, that has made him immortal.
Ti West manages to show its dark side beautifully, but not always preserve its magic.
Then comes that Christmas morning. Johnny Depp wakes up, opens his eyes, discovers that he is still alive and begins to laugh, incredulous and happy. For a moment the film forgets the ghosts, the darkness and even its own gothic ambition.
And in that disarming joy, in the discovery that he still has time, he finally finds all of Dickens.
