The film opens with a solemn-looking Eva videotaping herself, and saying
that whoever receives the Advent Calendar next must follow the rules, otherwise they'll die.
We are then taken to the past, specifically December 3rd,
which is none other than Eva’s birthday. Eva is a paraplegic who works as an insurance
agent, but she gets scolded for underperforming in her job for the past few months.
After a crappy day at work, she tries calling her father,
but is instead answered by her cold stepmother, Agnes, who simply informs her that her father has
already forgotten her due to his Alzheimer’s. Later that night, her best friend, Sophie,
pays her a surprise visit to celebrate her birthday and cheer her up. She comes bearing
a gift from Germany, a wooden Advent Calendar; for those who are unfamiliar with an Advent Calendar,
it is a common Christmas gift in the West that consists of a box with 24 tiny doors,
which you are supposed to open one each day starting from December 1st until December 24th.
However, the advent calendar that Sophie gives her has an ominous writing on the back,
that says “Dump it and I’ll Kill You.” Eva takes this message as a joke and
goes on to open the first door with a key she finds inside the box.
Inside the door is a piece of chocolate, and she discovers a series of German
phrases written on the wrapper. Sophie then helps her translate it;
it contains 3 sets of rules: First, the calendar contains candy, and if one is eaten,
all must be eaten, or you’ll die. Second, you have to respect all the rules until you open
the last door. And the last one, if you try throwing away the calendar, you’ll die.
Obviously thinking it’s ridiculous, Eva goes ahead and eats the chocolate.
Because this is the third of December, she also begins opening the second door,
which creeps her out a little because it contains her father’s favorite chocolate.
And on the third door, she finds an ominous card with more German writing.
It says: to cure hurt, destroy what hurt you.” Her curiosity drives her to try opening the
fourth door, but she finds the lock jammed. The two friends then spend the rest of the
evening sharing life stories in the kitchen, until at midnight, they hear the advent
calendar ring with a German recording that says “Midnight is here, open the door.”
Still thinking it’s silly, they go ahead, and try opening the fourth door again, and a wooden plank
of a cartoon man pops up as the door opens. It contains yet another piece of chocolate,
with writing that says “Jesus said to the cripple, Arise and walk.”
Because this hits a little too close to home, Eva turns gloomy. She tells Sophie that she’d like to
call it a night, and eats her father’s favorite chocolate after her friend goes home. But all of
the sudden, the phone starts ringing, and when she picks it up, she hears her senile father’s voice
wishing her a happy birthday before hanging up. This gets Eva excited, and she tries to
call her father back but he doesn’t pick up. At work, her boss announces that a trainee
named Myriam is going to be taking some of Eva’s clients, and might eventually take
over her job if Eva keeps underperforming. After work, Sophie picks her up and they
hang out for a bit at her house, during which time Eva tells her there might be
something magical with the calendar, because after eating her dad’s favorite chocolate,
he suddenly calls her on her disconnected landline. Her friend theorizes that maybe the
chocolate in the calendar is laced with drugs, and this is entirely possible because she stole
this calendar from a random vendor in Germany. Paying no more mind to this, Sophie takes her
to a bar for a double date. Sophie’s date is an obnoxious man named Boris, while Eva’s is a
handsome hunter who’s kind and considerate towards her throughout the night. Boris is unbelievably
rude to Eva during the whole dinner, and Hunter apologizes to Eva for his friend's behavior.
Shortly after, Sophie suddenly asks out Eva’s date because she finds him more attractive.
This disappoints Eva but she doesn’t say a thing, and because her friend is going
home with the hunter, Eva gets stuck with the obnoxious Boris, who agrees to drive
her home. Before he starts driving, he tries to convince her to install a trading app and
offers to give her money to invest. But Eva is too tired and tells him to start driving.
She falls asleep on the drive, and when she wakes up, she finds Boris inappropriately
touching her. Not only that, he unzips his pants and tries forcing her to pleasure him.
When Eva fights back, Boris angrily throws her and her wheelchair out into the street.
As he drives away, Eva curses that she wishes for him to just die out of anger. Unbeknownst to her,
something begins happening with the advent calendar right after.
A toy car that looks identical to Boris’ suddenly comes rolling out of the calendar,
which peeks the interest of Eva’s dog, Marvin. At the same time, Boris has parked his car in the
middle of nowhere to touch himself. When the messy dog rocks the toy car every which way,
Boris's car gets rocked too, and soon enough, he gets crushed to death.
That next morning, Eva gets a phone call from Sophie informing her about Boris’ death,
but right after, Eva suddenly gets a text message from Boris’ number that says he was sorry.
She shows the text to Sophie when they meet up right after, and Sophie decides to click on the
link at the bottom of the text, which leads Eva’s phone to start downloading
the trading app he suggested last night. Eva receives some money in it, just like
Boris promised. Also at the park, Sophie notices how a good looking man at the park seems to spark
Eva’s interest, but she’s too pessimistic to talk to him because she doesn’t think anyone
would want to be with someone in a wheelchair.
That night when the clock strikes 12 am, she opens
the next door on the advent calendar, and finds a heart-shaped chocolate in it. The following day,
when she goes to a restaurant, the man from the park is there, and she decides to order the same
drink he does. And just so happens, a distracted waitress momentarily puts both their drinks on
Eva’s table, an opportunity which Eva seizes to put the heart chocolate inside the man’s drink.
Right after the man drinks it, he suddenly walks up to her, and introduces himself as William.
They proceed to spend the rest of the day just talking to each other; they trade phone numbers,
and he even drives her home afterward. Feeling assured that there’s something magical
about the advent calendar now, she excitedly opens the next door, and eats the clock-shaped
chocolate she found this time. However, something weird suddenly happens; she finds that four more
doors have been opened in a blink of an eye, and there are numerous missed calls on her phone. To
make it even weirder, her boss scolds and fires her when she goes to work, as he claims that
she’s been skipping work for the past four days. This of course confuses Eva, because it doesn’t
feel like four days have passed to her. She then invites William to her house,
and tells him about the advent calendar and how she thinks the chocolate is laced with drugs.
Hearing this, William suggests her to stop eating the chocolate altogether.
When he leaves, she curiously decides to assemble the chocolate wrapper,
and surprisingly sees the the logo of one of the companies in her trading app. Seeing this
as a sign, she invests in the company, and immediately gets 9 cents of profit.
At some point during the night, the calendar exudes an ominous glow, and starts calling
the dog’s name. The curious Marvin walks up to it, and eats the bone-shaped chocolate inside.
And shortly after, the front door swings open, allowing him to go out.
On the next morning, Eva receives a bunch of notifications from her trading app, and happily
discovers that she’s made 486 euros overnight out of her investment. And then all of the sudden,
her dog Marvin starts barking from the front door, and she finds him covered in blood.
As she cleans him up, she finds a necklace pendant stuck to his teeth, and recalls that this is the
pendant on her boss’ necklace. Panicking, she tries calling her boss, but he doesn’t pick up,
implying that something has happened to him. Eva then finds the remains of Boris's car candy,
realizing something’s off with the advent calendar. So she begins to assemble the
used wrappers on the table, and plasters post-it notes over them to mark all the weird events that
happened ever since she received the calendar. The only chocolate she hasn’t eaten so far
is the one that comes with a note that says “Jesus said to the cripple, arise and walk.”
Wanting to prove whether there’s any truth to her assumption,
she eats the chocolate, and her body begins to violently shake.
The next time she wakes up, she's at the hospital, with William by her side. He informs her that she
was found in front of her house, holding onto the advent calendar and refusing to let it go.
Because she doesn’t at all remember what happened, they put her under a CT scan,
where she suddenly recalls that she walked for a brief moment before passing out.
When Eva returns home the next day, she goes ahead to open the next door when the
clock strikes 12 am again. At this moment, she considers eating the latest chocolate,
but decides against it. Instead, she proceeds to pay a visit to her father’s house.
There she wheels herself to her father, and feeds him the chocolate.
Right after,
he warms up to her, and seems to remember her name. But suddenly, he begins saying that the
calendar demands a price to pay every time something good happens, and so if Eva wishes
to walk, somebody she knows has to die. Her father also adds that he doesn’t mind getting
sacrificed when the time comes, and that if Eva refuses to let anyone die, she will die instead.
That night, she picks up her fifteenth chocolate, but decides to wait until the next day to take it.
She pays a visit to William at the hospital, and tells him that the last time she took the same
kind of chocolate, she walked, and so she wants to take this one and let him see what happens.
Here her body starts to convulse again,
William places a hand on her thigh to steady her, and when Eva wakes up, she excitedly
claims that her lower body can feel again. Later that day, he drives her to a public swimming
pool, since swimming is the only thing she can do. At the swimming pool, she meets Antoine,
a man who seems interested in her. Meanwhile, her boyfriend is driving
back to his workplace when he finds that she left her house keys in the car.
William then drives up to her house, and hides her key by her front door, but the
door suddenly swings open. The boyfriend then decides to enter the house to check things out.
He immediately discovers the notes on Eva’s table, and realizes that the chocolate
marked with the day they met contains a heart. And then suddenly, the phone rings, and he goes to
answer it. The caller is a creepy man speaking in German, which spooks him so he hangs up. He then
walks back up to the calendar, and sees this:
And a flipped writing begins writing itself on the mirror by the side of the calendar.
Realizing the calendar might be dangerous, he takes it with him, and decides to get rid of
the advent calendar. Unfortunately, he has no idea that breaking the rules would lead to his death.
And it is at this point that the scary figure from the calendar pops out of the water.
Scared, William enters his car, but the figure pops his window,
and drags him underwater until he dies.
At the same time, Eva who is swimming suddenly
discovers her lover’s dead body at the bottom of the water, but there is nothing she can do.
She then finds herself transported to the river when she resurfaces, and quickly swims ashore. Eva
finally witnesses the creepy figure walking up to her to return her calendar, before she passes out.
When she wakes up, she is somehow back home, with someone knocking on her door. It turns out to be
Antoine from the swimming pool, who claims that he found her wheelchair and belongings at the
pool and decided to return it to her. Since Eva is beyond overwhelmed at the moment, she tells him
to go away.
That evening, she eats the seventeenth chocolate,
and suddenly hears the sound of a phone ring coming from her bathroom.
Here she finds a glowing crack in the mirror, through which she sees William in her house,
answering a phone call, which is none other than the events from yesterday.
She desperately calls for his name, but he couldn’t seem to hear her,
so she carves out a message on the mirror, trying to tell him to not dump the calendar,
but the creeped out William simply closes the calendar, and the rest is history.
On the next evening, Eva appears to dread it when the calendar rings. This time,
a knife comes out of it, with a drawing that signifies that Eva must kill her dog. When
she refuses, a hand begins choking her, and so she reaches for the knife again.
When her friend Sophie pays her a visit that next morning, she finds a trail of blood all over the
floor, and finds Eva sitting with her dead dog at the end of it. Concerned, Sophie decides to spend
the night at her place to make sure she’s okay. Sophie explores the house, and goes through
old pictures of Eva from when she still had functioning legs and had a career as a dancer.
But then, she gets interrupted by the cartoon man popping out of the calendar.
When she opens the next door, it contains a chewing gum with a phallus logo on it,
so she smiles and tucks it into her pocket, right when an anxious Eva rolls in and demands her to
hand it over. But Sophie doesn’t give her the one she got from the calendar, so Eva feels no
effect at all. When Sophie takes her on a drive to a vacation cabin, she suddenly finds herself
transported to the past, to mere moments before the car accident that crippled her happened.
When she returns to the present, she’s in the vacation cabin with Sophie, and seems
distraught by the reminder that she can’t walk anymore, because Sophie got them into the car
accident in the past. And so she spends the day trying to remind herself that she loves Sophie
and doesn’t want to hurt her, while Sophie goes out hunting with her boyfriend, Hunter.
Sophie says she blames herself for what happens,
while Eva tries telling her that the calendar grants wishes at the cost of the lives of others,
because early on she was given a note that says “to cure hurt, destroy what hurts you,”
Eva thinks the calendar will eventually kill Sophie so she can walk again.
Sophie, feeling guilty, says she'd be okay with dying if Eva gets her legs back,
but Eva doesn't like this idea. Thus, she hands Sophie the latest chocolate from
the calendar and tells her to keep it because she's afraid Sophie will die if it's eaten now.
While Eva spends the night trying to convince the calendar to not kill her friend,
Sophie puts the chocolate by her bedside as she joins her boyfriend in their own room.
She also gives Hunter the phallus candy she got from the calendar previously.
Not long after, Eva discovers a compartment on top of the calendar, that contains a painting
along with a German address written on it.
She then hears a commotion coming from Sophie’s room,
followed by Sophie’s bloody body getting thrown out to the floor, along with her boyfriend’s.
Standing over them is the creepy calendar man. He kills them both and insists that Eva eat the
latest chocolate. Scared, she does as he asks.
It is the 21st day when Eva steps out of the
cabin, and by now, she is fully able to walk again.
She drives away from the cabin, and heads to the address inscribed on the canvas.
This leads her to the home of Alois Hoffman, a former German painter. The man does not remember
making the painting, as he has been blind for five years. He then begins feeling the surface
to try figuring out which painting of his this is, during which he gets horrific flashes of himself
brutally murdering his family because that is the image portrayed in the painting itself.
Infuriated by this, he tells her that this is nonsense, as there is no way he would
paint his family being dead, because as you can see, they are pretty much alive.
Hearing this, Eva theorizes that there must have been a time where he murdered them because
the calendar told him to. So basically, the blind painter must’ve also been tempted by the calendar
before, and he sacrificed his wife and son to get his vision back. But what makes it weirder is that
after December 24th, the advent calendar reverses time, and everything’s back the way it was.
It also made him forget about the things he had done, including the painting as a warning.
He then yells at her to get out of his house. The next time the calendar rings, she is on her
drive back home. Inside the latest door, she finds a doll resembling her co-worker Myriam,
who at the same time is taking a bath. When she tries putting it away,
the Calendar Man appears and begins to choke her. With no other choice, she reaches for the doll,
and begins breaking its limbs, and the same thing happens to Myriam until the woman dies.
In turn, when she gets home, she finds that her investment’s earnings keep increasing every day.
The next evening marks the 23rd day, and this time, she receives
her father’s favorite chocolate along with a gun, signifying that she has to murder him.
And so, she sends the calendar as a gift to her stepmother, who dislikes it and immediately
dumps it into the fire place.
But of course, the Calendar Man won’t have this, so he appears and
ends her life.
Meanwhile, Eva waits in front of the house, before making her way inside.
She finds her father, and feeds him the chocolate,
which gets him to remember more about her, and so they share a loving embrace. He’s
fully aware that it is now his turn to die, and is fully ready for it.
Eva points the gun at him, and tearfully pulls the trigger.
Later that day, she invites Antoine the swimming pool guy to her place, and they spend an intimate
night together. With nothing left to lose, she decides to tell him everything about the
calendar. Based on her conclusions from visiting the German painter, she explains to him that this
is the last night she’d be able to walk, and after this she’s going to fall asleep and wake
up on December first, and would be back to her paraplegic self. Not only that, every single event
that happened in the past 24 days wouldn’t have happened, and she won’t remember anything either.
Later that night, she heads up to the rooftop and records a message for the next person who receives
the advent calendar, telling them to follow the rules and if they die before December 24th,
all deaths will be final. She then lewdly dances until the calendar rings, and puts her
phone inside the compartment up top. Finally, the time for her to unlock the final door has come.
When she’s about to eat the 24th chocolate, Antoine suddenly steps in,
and recites the second rule to her, which is that you have to follow all the rules until
you open the last door. Since Eva has now opened the last door, she doesn't have to
obey the rules anymore. To prove this, he takes the calendar and dump it, but he doesn’t die.
He then tells her that she has the choice whether to eat the last chocolate, and get transported
back to December 1st, and everyone leaves but she’s paraplegic, or she can stay here,
and everyone stays dead but she’s able to walk. Eva’s mind races, and all the victims flash in
her head; she screams at the last chocolate, unsure which to choose.
The film ends with a man knocking on Eva’s door while holding a phone with a video of Eva on it,
revealing that he’s the next person to be cursed by the advent calendar after Eva.