On paper, Silent Night begins as everything a Christmas postcard promises: an English countryside home, a lovingly decorated tree, a grand feast almost ready, friends and family arriving with good bottles and good intentions. The only complication, and it is not a small one, is that everyone present knows tonight is the last night they will ever spend together. A toxic cloud is moving across the country. The pill that makes dying painless has already been handed out. What remains is the party.

Written and directed by Camille Griffin in her feature debut, the film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival before its December theatrical release. Griffin builds the entire premise on a single social question: what does a gathering do when the gathering has an expiration? Her answer is that it behaves exactly the same — the petty grievances, the unsaid things, the children in conversations they shouldn’t be in, the host trying to keep the plates warm and the feelings managed.

Keira Knightley and Matthew Goode play the hosts with the specific weariness of people who have been performing Christmas competence for too many years. Roman Griffin Davis, recognizable from Jojo Rabbit, carries the film’s most structurally important role: the child who won’t accept the logic the adults have agreed on. He is the movie’s spine, and the film is sharpest when the script trusts him with the argument.

The ensemble around them, Annabelle Wallis, Lily-Rose Depp, Sope Dirisu, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Lucy Punch, and Rufus Jones, fills the house with the particular social pressure of people who agreed to behave and may not all manage it. Griffin uses the group to draw class lines that the apocalypse does not erase but sharpens. The film is less interested in how the world ends than in who arrives at the ending with better furniture and more composure.

The film works more consistently in its first half than in its second. The setup is confident — the script lets social discomfort accumulate without over-explaining itself — but the back half pushes toward territory the structure has more trouble carrying. The final act makes choices that are less ambiguous than what preceded them, and whether those choices feel earned or abrupt is a question each viewer answers for themselves.

Silent Night does not resolve the gap between its comedic surface and its dramatic ambitions, and it is possible this is precisely the point. What Camille Griffin stages is less a thesis about dread than a document of how a specific kind of person chooses to spend the last evening. The manners stay intact longer than they should.