I’m completely able to having fun with a tacky Lindsay Lohan Netflix rom-com. Final 12 months, I favored “Irish Want,” and acquired tweaked for it. (I stand by the love.) However “Our Little Secret,” Lohan’s new Christmas rom-com, is crumpled tinsel of a distinct order. I’m tempted to say that it achieves full Netflix cookie-cutter. I cringed, I grimaced, I mentioned “No!…,” I pressured myself to cease how a lot time there was left.

Each rom-com wants that love-story MacGuffin referred to as the Factor That Retains Our Two Romantic Co-Stars Aside. However a part of the bizarre ineptitude of “Our Little Secret” is that it doesn’t have that factor. An animated prelude exhibits us that Avery (Lohan) and Logan (Ian Harding) grew up collectively, turned inseparable associates, fell in love…and it was all good. However then we minimize to 2014. The 2 are adults, and Avery is leaving for an unspecified job in London. So the connection is ending.

We expect: Actually, why? The film has instructed us these two are excellent lovebirds, meant for one another. If that’s the case, and one lands a job in London, wouldn’t they…focus on the longer term? Speak about what they’re going to do?

Nope. The film, with out devoting one explanatory line of dialogue to it, treats Avery’s profession as an existential relationship ender. When Logan, at her going-away social gathering, will get down on one knee to do a kind of embarrassing public rom-com marriage proposals, she appears to be like at him like he simply threw up on the carpet. She’s aghast. Why? As a result of the movie wants them to be aside and estranged. That’s the one cause. Hailey DeDominicis’ script sacrifices primary human emotion to the logic of arcs and beats and algorithms.

Lower to the current day, the place the actual enjoyable begins. Avery and Logan are again of their hometown (he’s a constructing contractor, she’s…effectively, her job stays obscure but “high-powered”), and every have important others, each markedly unappealing in that rom-com stooge method. Avery’s boyfriend, Cameron (Jon Rudnitsky), is a few form of nattering cryptcurrency bro. Logan’s girlfriend, Cassie (Katie Baker), is a manipulative Barbie-doll princess. Right here’s the hook, the spoiler, the shock: That terrible boyfriend and girlfriend are brother and sister. Which is why Avery and Logan, after having not seen one another for 10 years, wind up on the similar upscale household Christmas social gathering, presided over by a WASP matriarch from hell (Kristin Chenoweth), and conform to spend the vacation conserving secret that they have been as soon as the right couple.

On high of how moviemaking-by-AI all of it is, “Our Little Secret,” directed by the once-promising Stephen Herek (“Mr. Holland’s Opus”), is a cringe-fest. Take the scene the place Avery, who has gotten by accident stoned on THC gummies, has to offer a speech at church. She does her model of the Nativity story, which one way or the other incorporates the lyrics to Kool and the Gang’s “Have fun,” which causes Black members of the choir and the viewers to start out singing the music, which evokes everybody within the church to start out singing it. On the cringe scale, that’s a few 9.2.

Avery and Logan each must get on the nice facet of Erica, performed by Chenoweth with a control-freak hauteur so brittle it achieves excruciating self-mockery. Lohan, sly and centered, holds her personal amidst the broadness, and so does the sharp, dry Ian Harding (from “Fairly Little Liars”). However these two are too dogged to be humorous; that’s a part of why they belong collectively. The plot vaccums up all the opposite characters’ secrets and techniques (an affair, a late-night ingesting binge…and who ate all of the cookies?), then spews them out in a Christmas-as-disaster climax. It’s all spanked alongside by a kind of golly-gee bumptious vacation musical scores.

I do acknowledge the way in which a film like “Our Little Secret” works — how Netflix has modified the aesthetic of healthful film cheese. You watch “Our Little Secret,” seeing via the paper-thin contrivances, tittering on the imbecilities, and one way or the other that every one turns into a part of the expertise. It’s mainstream fodder as downgraded camp. It’s pablum so numbing it makes you’re feeling good.