Christmas on Mistletoe Lake Movie Review

Christmas on Mistletoe Lake transports us to a small, seaside village known for its Christmas Harbor Festival. In a town known for its holiday charm, it's no wonder tourists flock to the location to celebrate Christmas. With no room at the inn, Reilly is stuck searching for a place to stay when Emma and her Dad offer their boat as refuge. Does this Lifetime Christmas movie sink or swim? Here's a complete review for Lifetime's Christmas on Mistletoe Lake.

Christmas on Mistletoe Lake Synopsis

Reilly (Genelle Williams) grew up in a family that moved a lot. It was tough for Reilly and her sister to adjust to the constant change in location, so the family came up with a tradition of choosing a special place to gather each Christmas. This year, Reilly chose Mistletoe Lake. She loves the quiet, waterfront community for its authentic look and feel.

She immediately feels at home when she visits the local store and meets Ray (Corey Sevier) and his daughter Emma (Hattie Kragten). When they learn that Reilly has no place to stay, its Emma who suggests that she stay on their boat in the harbor. In return, Reilly helps Ray get it fixed up and ready to sell. But prior to selling the boat, Ray promises Emma that they can decorate it one last time and enter it into the Christmas Harbor Festival. It's the send-off the boat and family deserve.

Christmas on Mistletoe Lake: The Good

This is one of those movies that is sweet through and through. All of the characters are nice and you root for things to go their way. Of course they mix in some drama in the storyline about Reilly's tension with her sister over their staging business. And, the struggle Reilly has with whether that's what she wants to be doing with her life.

She is an interior designer and wants to help families really build homes, and not just stage fake homes for people. That struggle comes to a point when her main client happens to the be prospective buyer of Ray's boat. But even with this tension built into the storyline, it's still an overly positive movie which makes it nice.

I love boats and the water so I do love movies in that setting. There's also nothing prettier than boats decorated for Christmas, so I enjoyed the harbor lights festival.

This is the second Christmas movie of the season for Corey. He kicked off Hallmark's season with Noel Next Door. His character in that role had more depth, but that doesn't make him any less enjoyable in Christmas on Mistletoe Lake. The entire cast was nice to watch and overall the movie wasn't bad. Not the best of the season, but certainly not the worst.

Christmas on Mistletoe Lake Pet Peeves

I just wrote about this the other day in my review of Merry Swissmas. It drives me crazy when they make an error with costumes and shoot a scene with two different looks. One of the closing scenes is the party at the yacht club. Reilly is wearing two different outfits. I actually rewound to double check what was going on and I think it may have come down to two different “jackets”, but still she has two different looks that they show off. Errors like this drive me crazy.

OK, so it's cold enough for them to go cross country skiing but it's warm enough for Reilly to be sleeping on the boat? I call crap on this. First, I have a hard time imagining that there would be snow along the water. But even if there was, I don't think that they would be cross country skiing. Especially since the scene by the lighthouse was so windy. Not fun cross country skiing in that much wind. And that brings me back to Reilly. Would she really be comfortable (aka warm enough) sleeping on a boat if it's that cold outside? Seems fishy to me.

Without giving things away, there are a lot of Christmas miracle types of events that happen in the last few minutes of the movie. Some of it I get, but some of it I think is BS.

Christmas on Mistletoe Lake Recap

Christmas on Mistletoe Lake is a light-hearted and charming movie. It isn't one that's going to knock your socks off and I'm not sure if it's that original or memorable, but it has a good cast and decent story that makes it enjoyable.

Lifetime Channel