Watched: 01/21/2026
Format: Hallmark
Viewing: First
Director: Scott Smith
Here in real life, we're prepping for a winter storm coming this weekend, and I knew I was planning to finish watching Mademoiselle Fifi in the evening, so we threw on this RomCom from Hallmark, Frozen In Love (2018).
The film is not a Christmas movie, but the stuff Hallmark programs, post-holidays, to fill the winter months. Yes, there is snow and ice and ice hockey in this movie. No, I don't know anything about hockey.
Our story finds a hockey player with PR issues meeting a bookish book store owner (Rachael Leigh Cooke) who is using the same PR agent (Sandy Sidhu) to promote her book store. The PR agent pairs the two, giving them public activities to do together for mutually good press/ self-destruction, and they snipe at one another until they fall for one another. You know the drill.
Man is played by Hallmark Hunk Niall Matter, as I understand it - a Hallmark favorite. And he's not bad. He plays a sort of hothead with bad decision-making abilities and a tendency to get in fights with refs - and is at risk of losing his career.
Cooke's bookshop owner is maybe a bit rigid, and not particularly all sunshine and flowers, but smart - treating her own bookshop as a library which she absorbs like a sponge. She may be running her shop into the ground, unable to change.
Cooke doesn't just star, she's the writer and executive producer. And that's one of the odd and kind of cool things about Hallmark - if you're in and smart, you really can be your own one-stop shop as you stay inside the Hallmark lines. And since this movie was made, where those lines are is increasingly hazy as indicated by Cooke's more recent movies.
Yeah, the movie has some typical Hallmark stuff - like, maybe making the love interest a rage monster raises some questions that get swept under the rug. And the conflict in the last 20 minutes makes no sense given how the movie is set up - why would the hockey team spend money to promote an event at the bookstore where Man is supposed to be signing posters and then double book him?
But other parts feel pretty smart, and they had actual jokes in the movie - not just "and I gave a wan smile as that happened" moments. The ideas that are presented as "this would improve the bookstore" actually kind of make sense, and I can't tell you what a novelty that is.
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