Critics Split on Depp's Scrooge as Ebenezer Opens to Mixed Reviews

The reviews for Ebenezer landed on Thursday, a day before Ti West's darker take on A Christmas Carol opens in UK cinemas, and they split along one clear line. Almost everyone admires the film around Johnny Depp. The argument is about Depp.

The setup is familiar with the temperature lowered. West, a horror director, opens with a prologue before Jacob Marley's death that Dickens never wrote, then tells the story in the book's five staves, announced on screen. Ian McKellen plays Marley, Andrea Riseborough is the Ghost of Christmas Past, Tramell Tillman is Christmas Present, and Daisy Ridley plays Clara, Scrooge's niece. It runs 116 minutes and carries a PG-13 rating, a 12A in the UK, and it is Depp's first major studio film since the 2022 defamation trial.

Radio Times, at three stars, gave the divide its clearest form. Depp's Scrooge is "over-egged," the review said, mostly scowling with very little substance, a portrayal that strays close to pantomime. And yet: "Visually, it's stunning." The review credited cinematographer Checco Varese and production designer Eve Stewart with a richly atmospheric, decaying London, and singled out Riseborough's Past, a glowing spectre with pupilless eyes "almost scary enough to raise the film's 12A to a 15."

The Playlist went much further, calling the film "punishingly dull" and "wholly unnecessary," handsomely mounted but emotionally inert, with Depp delivering a greatest-hits compilation of his familiar mannerisms. Consequence found Depp cartoonish and unconvincing in the turn toward kindness, though it praised the unusual interior life the film gives Belle and Ridley's two scenes. The AV Club heard sincerity flavored with "dinner-theater ham" in the lead performance, while noting the film sits closer to Dickens than its trailers suggested, and that Tillman serves the best ham in it.

Not everyone landed negative. Absolute Geeks scored it 3.8 out of 5, calling Depp a brilliant monster but a so-so saint, and Australia’s X-Press gave it 7 out of 10 for a faithful retelling with genuinely dark ghosts, even as it judged Depp out of step with the rest of the production. Metacritic's tally on the day told the same spread in numbers: 28 critic reviews, running from 80 in The Telegraph down to 16 in The Playlist.

The early social reactions earlier in the week had been warmer, with critic Scott Menzel praising West for treating the story "like a true ghost story." The full reviews kept the ghost story and questioned the man at the center of it. Ebenezer opens Friday, and audiences get the deciding vote.