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(Reviewing after binge-watching the whole of the first season.)

Entertaining, but too gentle to be described as a thriller.

The strong points are: Sophie Rundle's performance as the central character, Consul Laura Simmonds; Philipp Boos' performance as Fabian Hartmann; Isak Férriz's performance as Inspector Castells; and the generally well-paced script.

Sophie Rundle is reported as saying: "This is the closest to myself that I've ever played. I know women like Laura, and I went to school with girls like her." (Source: "What's on TV", UK listings magazine.) And the story arc of the death of the young man on the yacht provides a solid backbone, one from which single episode stories are successfully hung.

The weak points are that the conclusion of the story arc feels very rushed in the final episode -- in stark contrast with the way it had evolved at a natural pace in the previous episodes. And Carl Hyndley (played by Dylan Brady) is an underused character and appears to be there only to provide someone who takes offence at an apparent "Karen" in episode 5. If this gets a second season, they need to put some work in to evolve the character from a simple stereotype.

Lots of laughter from me at many points in the first two thirds of this film. But I wasn't interested in the "resolution" in the final third.

It's not so much that "director" Lola Cuevas (played by Penélope Cruz) requires her "actors" to do absurd things, but the things are just so silly that I couldn't help but laugh out loud at them. (Do any of those things really make much sense, or are they simply "incantations"?)

I felt this started going wrong when a character (nameless to avoid slight spoilers) is explaining a medical diagnosis to two other characters. I wasn't sure if we were meant to take the character seriously or not. Indeed, was the actor playing the character intentionally doing a bad job of convincing the two other characters? This is when things started to be less fun.

There's so much in here about families and how Christmas brings out the best and worst in them, that it almost feels like the writer is presenting a theory and philosophy of family Christmas.

It's one of the most interesting and innovative of the "family Christmas" sub-genre of Christmas movies that I've seen.

That said, there is an awful lot going on here and I got a little lost as I wasn't paying full attention. Not least because the description I read didn't make it clear that events are happening at different times in the same location. So I was struggling, at times, to work out precisely how the various characters spanned the 3 time periods.