In an interview with David Canfield for Vanity Fair, director Alexander Payne indicated he had some icky feelings in regards to people calling his 2023 movie The Holdovers ‘cozy.’
“I’ve got to tell you, I’m always a little surprised to hear this, “Oh, it’s like a cozy movie, or a warm hug, or putting on a sweater on a cold day and drinking hot cocoa.” Part of that nauseates me a little bit. I thought I was just making a decent movie about people.”
The two discuss the term ‘cozy’ and whether the movie is or isn’t that, and I think thanks to Canfield Payne walks away with a slightly better understanding of the word, but I still think he thinks it might be an insult or at least not what he was shooting for with his movie which is insane because yes, The Holdovers, is in fact a ‘cozy’ movie, and the fact that it’s a Christmas movie has barely anything to do with it.
I basically know nothing about Alexander Payne, but he’s a sixty-three year old who’s been directing and writing movies since the early 1990s, so I’m going to go ahead and assume that he does not have time for video games and is probably not aware, or at least minimally so, that ‘cozy’ has become its own genre. When people call this movie ‘cozy,’ they’re not thinking of sweaters and hot cocoa. They’re thinking of the genre.
So let’s go over the main features of what makes a cozy video game cozy, and how that applies to The Holdovers. I won’t be going into details of this movie so consider this spoiler-free, but also if you haven’t seen it yet go see The Holdovers because it is so, so good.
Unhurried
Yes, ‘unhurried’ and not ‘slow.’ It’s not that there’s nothing to do in a cozy game, you always have tasks because otherwise it’s not, you know, a game. But there’s generally no time limit. No NPC rushing you. I haven’t actually played Animal Crossing but I’m pretty sure Tom Nook doesn’t evict you if you don’t pay your mortgage back fast enough.
My personal, perennial cozy game has been Breath of the Wild, and yeah, “Defeat Ganon” shows up as a task within the first half an hour, but then it just sort of sits there. Calamity Ganon keeps circling around the castle. I can go fight him now. I can go fight him in three hundred hours after I’ve maxed out how many apples and mushrooms I can carry. It doesn’t matter. Zelda has held his ass back for a hundred years, she can do it for a few more months.
Cozy games give the player space to breathe.
The Holdovers is not only a period piece taking place in the 1970s, but its filmed to make it look like it was made in the ’70s, even going as far as to digitally add film grain and use an out-of-style aspect ratio. More importantly, the movie moves along the way movies generally did in the seventies. There’s a slower pace to the editing. The cuts are longer. The scenes are longer. The movie is by no means slow or plodding, it never drags, but there’s this, well, unhurried feeling to its pace. It will tell its story, in its own time.
Simple Plots
Eh, okay, this one might sound like an insult but I swear it’s not. Not every single game needs a huge, overarching, branching main story, dozens of side quests, and hundreds of NPCs all demanding your attention. Those are fun, of course, but sometimes all you want to do is spend a couple of hours unpacking boxes, or designing your home, or running around in your silly little mask trying to find all nine hundred koroks.
There is an element to Red Dead Redemption 2 I desperately want to qualify as cozy, namely the open world. I have spent so many hours in that game wandering around in the woods and prairie and desert with my little binoculars trying to spot all fifty-four individual species of birds (another laughing gull? Damn it, I need a ring-billed gull!), and the amount of random stuff you can just trip over in the middle of the woods make the game a wanderer’s dream, but it’s disqualified because not only is the plot a literal tragedy, the game constantly tries to drag you back into it. As in, if you’re away from camp for too long Bill or John or some other horse’s ass comes looking for you and tries to get you to come back and the only reason I don’t shoot them is because the game won’t let me. I’m not here for a treatise on self-destruction rooted in greed and obsession and the cyclical nature of violence, I’m here to get a perfect squirrel carcass for one of my pen pals, fuck off.
The plot of The Holdovers is simple compared to all the big budget action movie swamping the theaters for the past decade. There’s no world domination plot, no barely-answered mysteries, and no cast of dozens each with enough lore to make a DM blush. It’s three people forced together for a span of a few weeks and learning to connect with each other simply because humans are social animals and that’s what we do. It’s by no means lesser than those other big plots. If anything, it’s a pure distillation of what those other movies should have at their heart (and sometimes doesn’t). It’s simple, but important.
Chill Vibes
This one is so obvious I almost don’t need to list it but I’ll put it down for posterity. You know what has a minimal plot? Thumper. You know what’s not a cozy game? Fucking Thumper.
It’s a rhythm game, which doesn’t automatically disqualify it, but the entire mood is one of unrelenting anxiety, specifically that sort of generalized anxiety where there’s no obvious reason why you think you’re about to die, but you’re pretty sure it’s about to happen anyway and your heart is beating way too fast but there’s no reason for it to be going so fast because you’re just sitting there eating a sandwich and trying to pretend you’re not freaking out when you’re definitely freaking out but there’s no reason for you to be freaking out besides a chemical imbalance and you want to calm down but you can’t so you just keep eating your sandwich in a cloud of fear and hope it passes eventually.
That’s no mood for a cozy game.
Cozy games tell you that, at least for the moment, everything is okay. The music is calm, the color palette is soft, and if anyone comes up to you with sinister intent you are legally allowed to walk away. Anxiety? What anxiety? All you have to do today is farm a little and maybe go to the shops. Nothing to be anxious about here.
The Holdovers takes place over Christmas break but I wouldn’t quite call it a Christmas movie any more than I would call any Shane Black movie a Christmas movie. Christmas is the setting, but it isn’t the point.
Christmas is also not what makes this movie chill. Sure, for a lot of people there’s something comforting and nostalgic about Christmas, and the movie definitely utilizes that in a few scenes, but for a lot of others Christmas is either a big fat nothing or a particularly stressful time that brings only high blood pressure and bad memories.
There are a lot of scenes in this movie that don’t highlight the season, and they are still chill. In attempting and achieving that seventies independent movie look they created a soft color palette and a sort of Vaseline-on-the-lense look. The characters talk to each other in conversational tones, and even when they’re arguing generally don’t start screaming at each other. And the few times they do raise their voices, it’s all very realistic. And the music is exactly what you’d expect from a movie like this, by which I mean at no point does it completely drown out the dialogue.
The Holdovers is a movie about three people getting through the holiday and in a sea of superhero movies and Fast and Furioses and Missions Impossibles that simplicity is enough to make it feel cozy.
Coziness is for Everyone
There is, unfortunately, a lot of discourse around cozy games centered around – what else – misogyny. The idea that cozy games are soft and gentle and not filled with over-the-top ultraviolence means that a lot of people equate cozy games with women, and thus a lot of these same people think cozy games are less fun, less important, or even completely trivial and childish. The conversation around cozy games and toxic masculinity in gaming spaces is one for an entirely different article.
I certainly hope that Alexander Payne did not have this mindset when he said the idea of his movie being cozy ‘nauseates’ him. I hope he simply didn’t know that there was a whole cozy genre out there, and that if someone actually took the time to explain it to him he’d be more open to the label. Because I don’t think cozy games are any lesser than non-cozy games, and I think coziness is for everyone. How could it not be? How could anyone out there be so fucking jacked and manly and bearded that they wouldn’t appreciate a few minutes of calm music, nice conversation, and easy to follow tasks? When people call The Holdovers cozy I don’t think they’re thinking about bunny rabbits in mittens or whatever. They’re thinking about something that will stop bombarding them with flashing, shiny objects and just let them breathe for a couple of hours.
High Urban Fantasy Jazz 