In the movie's opening scene, our lead character Amy (Elisabeth Harnois) discovers her boyfriend's desire to have an open relationship and the fallout serves as the vehicle to launch her journey from Chicago to her brother's place in Vienna. She decides to get some ball tickets at a dance studio in Vienna. While there, a wealthy instructor Lukas (Christian Oliver) immediately wants her to be his replacement partner for a midnight ball dance competition without knowing how well she can dance. Romantic interests follow and the story follows the formula quite well to the end.
Including the unbelievability of the opening premise of this movie, there are some unsettling aspects to it. There are three men who have a romantic interest in Amy and all are quite aggressive in pursuing Amy and placing her in difficult scenarios to resist their advances. Amy would be drawn in by their attention then suddenly realizing what was happening become quite creeped-out by the situation. I'm not sure if the director intended these scenes to play this way, it was how Elisabeth Harnois interpreted her character's response to the advances or just the actors taking some artistic interpretation on the scenes. Most versions of these movies have a slow progression of "not interested" to "he's the one" by the last 5 minutes. Amy's character went back and forth in every scene and this pendulum made the movie feel quite uncomfortable to watch at times.
Overall, this movie is very much a hybrid between Hallmark's 2020 version of Christmas in Vienna and Christmas Waltz storylines. Not sure who stole whose idea on this one or if somebody at Hallmark hated this movie so much they decided they could do it better. Christmas Waltz features much higher dancing quality, set decorations and very strong chemistry between the lead actors. Hallmark's Christmas in Vienna version features a better and socially correct version of our subject movie's story. Either of these films would be recommended over this one.
