Movie Review: Adult Swim Debuts Feature Horror Movie with Annual Adult Swim Yule Log

The Fireplace (2022)

Directed by Casper Kelly

Written by Casper Kelly

Starring Andrea Laing, Justin Miles

Release Date December 11th, 2022, on Adult Swim, Debut on HBO Max December 12th, 2022

Published December 12th, 2022

Cartoon Network's Adult Swim has become a hub of alternative comedy for more than a decade. The Adult Swim brand has brought such weird and ambitious projects as The Greatest Event in Television History, where big stars re-enacted the opening theme songs of 80s TV series, and most famously the viral sensation, Too Many Cooks. That massive hit arrived on Adult Swim seemingly at random late one weekend and by the following day was an internet sensation.

Now, Adult Swim is set for another viral triumph that seemed to have come out of nowhere. Once again teaming with the man behind Too Many Cooks, writer and director Casper Kelly, Adult Swim debuted their annual Yule Log presentation immediately following the season six finale of the hit cartoon series Rick and Morty. But this was no mere Yule Log. Instead, what starts as a warm and welcoming fire in a lovely fireplace begins to morph into a horror movie called The Fireplace.

After just a few minutes of a typical static shot of Yule Log, a voice can be heard. A cleaning lady has entered the room and her cleaning brings her to walk in front of the Yule Log camera, though she remains mostly out of frame. She's carrying on an animated conversation about her night's work as we remain staring at the fire. Suddenly, as she changes to listening loudly to music on headphones, another figure enters the room, a hulking brute of a man followed by the voice of someone who seems to be this man's mother.

The hulking brute brutally murders the cleaning lady. We only know this from her screams and the horrific sound design. The camera remains on the fireplace, and it appears the whole movie might stay in this static shot with the sound design and dialogue acting almost like a terrifying radio play. The scene ends with the arrival of a couple who is renting this cottage where the fireplace is located. The murderers quickly retreat, dragging the body of the cleaning lady into a nearby room, just as the couple enters, far too involved in their conversation to see if anything is out of place. Mother was cleaning as her son was committing his heinous murder.

All of this happens in mere minutes with the camera pointed at the Yule Log. It's accomplished almost completely through sound design and the occasional sight of legs moving past the camera. Director Casper Kelly deftly and ingeniously uses the tools of filmmaking to craft the early horror here and it sets a brilliant tone for the rest of the movie which will capitalize on sound design and camera work throughout to create so much horror fun.

After the opening sequence we meet our main characters, Andrea Lang and Justin Miles portray a married couple who have rented this cabin for the weekend. The reason the camera has been set up and is capturing the Yule Log is because Justin's job is as a Yule Log YouTuber. He does other stuff as well, but it is a fun reason for him to be capturing the action of the movie. He's filming the Yule Log but also wants film his proposal, he's asking Andrea to marry him.

The couple are interrupted by the local sheriff who arrives at the cabin and says that there was a murder nearby. Of greater concern to the sheriff, however, is the Yule Log. It seems that Justin took the log from a sacred tree, a former hanging tree, and the tree may be cursed. Where this plot thread goes, I will leave you to discover. Writer-director Casper Kelly makes sure that the Yule Log has a very literal role to play in the brilliantly absurd and often genuinely scary events of The Fireplace.

I don't want to spoil anything further about The Adult Swim Yule Log aka The Fireplace, it's so brilliantly absurd that my descriptions could not do it justice. Casper Kelly, the brilliantly disturbed mind behind Too Many Cooks, has crafted in The Adult Swim Yule Log/The Fireplace, an ingenious series of filmmaking challenges that he turns into high level comic horror. The ideas are wildly absurd, but they proceed from a place of insidious and disturbing horror. This movie is a swirling vortex of insanity at times, but it all coalesces into an ingenious exercise in horror filmmaking, one quite fitting for the reputation of the mind behind Too Many Cooks.

The Adult Swim Yule Log/The Fireplace aired in a slightly edited for TV form on Sunday, December 11th, and is now now available to stream on HBO Max. If you didn't catch it live, watch it immediately on HBO Max. The Adult Swim Yule Log/The Fireplace is one of my favorite horror movies of 2022. It's both scary and hilarious in equal measure. The sheer audacity of the big ideas at play, aliens, haunted logs, dangerous hillbillies, it's all wonderfully, terrifyingly absurd. It's a must see.

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