With half a dozen story lines brushing against each other on Christmas Eve, Bent Hamer’s follow-up to O’Horten, his 2007 comedy of nerves, is not unlike a certain British film from a few years back. There’s a married man weighing abandoning his family for his mistress, a vagrant reconciling with an old friend, a mugging that turns into child delivery, too-cute schoolchildren discovering romance—oh, hell, I’ll say it plainly: Home for Christmas is the Scandinavian response to Love, Actually. Though based on a 2006 collection of short stories, Only Soft Presents Under the Tree, by the Norwegian author Levi Henriksen, the true source material is quite obvious. The Finns had it right with Rare Exports, wherein unwitting Laplanders ran for cover from a monster Santa on a killing spree. Norway, it seems, went with the same old Yuletide schmaltz with the typical themes—love, family, innocence, babies—that sucks the holiday season dry.

at 6:30 p.m.; also on Friday, April 15 at 6:30 p.m. Both showings at Avalon Theatre.