A Suite Holiday Romance 2025 Movie Review
Hallmark Channel’s latest ‘Countdown to Christmas’ movie tries to do something different as two romances, past and present, play out. Unfortunately, the main story is a bit contrived while the B-story completely outshines it.
It’s Christmas week when Sabrina Post (Jessy Schram) arrives at the iconic Grand Fairbanks Hotel in New York City, ready to accept the ghostwriting position for the memoir of Grayson Westcott — a famous art dealer. As a struggling writer, Sabrina can’t believe her luck: a paycheck and a stay in her own suite at the hotel. She feels like Cordelia, the heroine from her favorite series of children’s books written by Hazel Holley. What promises to be a perfect week is complicated when Sabrina meets Ian Turner (Dominic Sherwood), a handsome British visitor, at the hotel bar. When Ian assumes Sabrina is another wealthy guest at the hotel, she doesn’t correct him — a decision she doesn’t regret after learning that Ian is a member of the British aristocracy. Or so she thinks. The truth is that Ian is not a wealthy lord but is the personal secretary of Lord Spencer Braxton (Adam Hurtig). Ian is in town for the holidays to oversee the installation of an exhibit featuring the Braxton Royal Jewels at the Avalon Museum. As the week unfolds, Sabrina shows Ian Christmas in New York and the two start to fall for each other.
The official Hallmark description of the movie lays out only the main plot of the movie, and that plot is troublesome. Jessy meets the stranger (with terribly chapped lips) at the bar. Her friend Anna is a total Anglophile, so she is all about seeing the royal jewels and maybe even a royal, knowing that Lord Braxton is to be in town. Sabrina only assumes the man from the bar, whom she overhears while in a booth next to him at a restaurant, is Lord Braxton, which brings up the biggest question of the movie: how on earth does no one know what Lord Braxton looks like? He’s a royal. He has a reputation as a serial proposer. He’s a bit of a loose cannon, so how is it that there is not a single photograph of him anywhere. Anna would certainly know what he looks like and the guy in the next booth is definitely not him. Sabrina also allows the stranger to believe she is not who he thinks she is, just letting him think she is some well-to-do visitor, though she does finally explain that she is a local staying in the hotel for work — which she cannot discuss due to an NDA. But because of a contrived plot device that suggests Lord Braxton is in town incognito, Sabrina just goes along without ever letting on that she knows who he is (even though he isn’t who she thinks). Poor Ian has no idea she thinks he’s Lord Braxton, but since his employer is supposed to be invisible, Ian also can’t be honest with Sabrina every time he has to run off in the middle of a date to pull Spencer’s fat from the fire. And when he wants to tell her, he doesn’t have the spine to do it without Spencer for moral support, and of course Spencer ghosts him to run off with hotel jewelry shop manager Tabitha. Everything comes to a head at the unveiling of the exhibit, and when Lord Braxton is called upon to speak, Sabrina is appalled that her date doesn’t move, suddenly feeling betrayed and stabbed in the back and lied to because Ian didn’t tell him that he was just Spencer’s secretary. Because he didn’t know she thought he was Lord Braxton! The way she ran off in a huff and then just flat out called him a liar … she didn’t deserve him. In fact, the best thing she did was (mis)take advice from her temporary employer and write Ian a note telling him she was willing to break her own heart than let him do it to her. He was smitten and wanted to stay and smooth things over, but this is a situation in which you absolutely cannot root for their romance to blossom. That’s not good!
On the other hand, the movie turns totally charming as Grayson Westcott is relating his life story to Sabrina for an article he’s commissioned. He chose her because of a piece she wrote about Hazel Holley, because she grew up on Holley’s series of children’s books, ‘Cordelia at the Grand Fairbanks Hotel’. Sabrina even gets to stay in the hotel’s Cordelia Suite during her ten day stay while she interviews Grayson. If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because it is directly taken from Kay Thompson’s Eloise at the Plaza book series and, yes, there is an Eloise Suite at the actual Plaza Hotel in New York. I’m not sure whether the movie is plagiarising or honoring the source material (or a jab at Media Rights Capital for not allowing them to use the character or author as part of the story). During one of their interview sessions, Westcott lets slip about his past as a young butler at the hotel, something he is reluctant to talk about, but as he begins to be more aware of Sabrina’s budding romance with ‘Lord Braxton’, he decides to tell her more about his youth … on the condition that it will not be part of the story until he has time to think it over. Westcott reveals that he was the butler to Hazel Holley, and he often contributed ideas to her stories as she would present him with options on which way a story should go, like what kind of gift Cordelia should give to her pet turtle (hmmm, Eloise also has a pet turtle … don’t tell the attorneys). At a holiday event at the hotel, young Grayson discovers a young lady named Charlotte hiding under a table, doing all she can to avoid a boy who just proposed to her. It was an arranged proposal, and all Charlotte wants to do is live her life and attend art school in London. Grayson helps her avoid her fate that night and the proposal is eventually withdrawn, which means Charlotte and Grayson can spend more time together and build on their own romance. Hazel always offers Grayson words of advice, but New Year’s Eve is fast approaching and if he doesn’t make his move, Charlotte will leave for London. Hazel decides that the one way he can win Charlotte over is to give her a portrait of Cordelia that hangs in the hallway outside of her suite. She gifted it to the hotel and she surmises it is her to give away, so she and Grayson carry out a heist to ‘steal’ the portrait so he can gift it to Charlotte. But at the party, Charlotte tells him she has to follow her dream and leaves him during the strains of Auld Lang Syne, the portrait gift wrapped and leaning against the wall untouched. Grayson knew he had to let her go so he allowed himself to break his heart and that was the lesson Sabrina took … but Grayson was gobsmacked that that was what she got from his story because he’s had nothing but regrets ever since. Now with the Braxtons and Ian about to return to London, will Sabrina be able to catch him and make amends before it’s too late? And might Grayson himself also get a royal surprise?
A Suite Holiday Romance is just a bit frustrating with the main story of Sabrina and Ian. The whole thing is built upon mistaken identity and fear of being honest, so how do you build a relationship on that? It’s just maddening that Sabrina thinks Ian is Lord Braxton and just goes on day after day with him like everything is normal while expecting him to reveal his identity while the poor sap has no idea what she’s thinking. At some point she could have just pulled him aside and asked him flat out if he was really Spencer Braxton. The fact that she gets so angry when the truth is revealed while he is totally oblivious just leaves a bad taste in your mouth. It wasn’t his fault that she thought he was a royal simply because she overheard a conversation. And the whole thing about no one knowing what Lord Braxton looks like is pretty unbelievable in this day and age of camera phones in every pocket and royals-stalking paparazzi. I’m sure she or her friend could have Googled (or whatever fictional search engine they’d use in the movie that looks like Google) his name and found a picture. That also makes us question whether Sabrina would have even been interested in Ian had she known he was just a ‘lowly’ secretary. Her behavior when the truth comes out makes it all the more icky. But then there is the charming story of young Grayson and Charlotte that is so endearing that it’s truly heartbreaking when she does leave him. That story is so much more compelling and moving than Sabrina’s.
I’m not sure if writer Andrea Canning is totally to blame for how this story plays out, but someone somewhere had to have read the script and should have said they didn’t like the way Sabrina’s story takes that turn. There’s just too much subterfuge going on, but perhaps they were also so drawn in to Grayson’s story that they didn’t notice Sabrina’s terrible behavior at the end. Director Jeff Beesley makes the most of the hotel locations and the Cordelia Suite, but the thing that really gives the story a bit of magic and romance is the way he transitions from the present to Grayson’s teenage years, going from a standard, colorful image in the present to one that quickly obtains a golden hue for the past. It was a lovely way to differentiate the two time periods and it just made Grayson’s story feel all the more romantic.
Jessy Schram is fine as Sabrina. Her best moments come as she is with Grayson listening to his story and ‘seeing’ the scenes he’s setting up unfold. Her performance with Dominic Sherwood is a bit more complicated because she always has to keep him at an arm’s length since every time they are together he has to run off. They do have some nice chemistry when he takes her to her favorite bookstore for an event he helped set up for the children, but any goodwill she garners with the viewer is lost once Sabrina is forced to leave in a huff. She does what she can to make us feel sympathy for her, but we know as well as she does that Ian never lied to her about who he was, she just made an assumption. Sherwood is also fine as Ian, more in handler mode with Spencer than romance mode with Sabrina. I just didn’t buy that he was into her at all (and his resemblance to a younger Ewan McGregor just kept distracting me). Adam Hurtig plays Spencer as a total irresponsible jerk, as he was written. They all do what they can with the material they’ve been given, trying hard to elevate their roles.
On the other side of things, Al Sapienza is excellent as Grayson. He relates the story of his youth with great warmth, clearly holding on to the love he lost as a teenager. His reaction to Sabrina misinterpreting the moral of his story is authentic, and he probably should have thrown her out right then and there, concerned that maybe she wasn’t the best writer to tell his story. Gino Anania is outstanding as young Grayson. He’s attentive to Hazel, he wears his heart on his sleeve, he looks at Megan Best’s Charlotte with all the love one could have for someone they barely know, he totally breaks your heart when she leaves. He gives a remarkably sensitive performance, and he counters so well with Lauren Cochrane as Hazel. She is a character right out of a 1930s screwball comedy, especially in the way she speaks (and technically, young Grayson’s story takes place in the 1970 but it does have a ’30s vibe). She brings more comedy to the scenes with Anania, and the heist scene is a hoot. Megan Best also makes the most of her small role as Charlotte, totally connecting with Anania’s Grayson, making it all the more heart-achingly sad when she has to leave, her story becoming even more sad as she reads through her letters to Grayson how things in London did not turn out as she expected. Theirs was a tragic romance that could have had a much happier ending … but maybe it still can.
The rest of the supporting cast all do great jobs, particularly Reena Jolly as Tabitha — even though we all want to yell ‘run girl’ at her before she gets too close to Spencer (but she ends up holding her own) — and Donna Fletcher as Lady Violet, Spencer’s mother who is also a sort of mother figure to Ian.
Over all, A Suite Holiday Romance is a half tolerable movie and half totally enjoyable romance with secondary characters we care more about than the leads. That is what truly makes the movie better than it ought to be.
