Among the most unusual holiday movies you’ll ever see, Last Christmas merges a recovery saga with a love story. Kate (Emilia Clarke from Game of Thrones) is a mess of a 26-year-old, sleeping on friends’ sofas, dragging her suitcase of belongings to her job as the elf-clerk at a London Christmas shop. We gradually learn she’s recently been seriously ill, and that she doesn’t get along with her Croatian immigrant mother (Emma Thompson, who also co-wrote the screenplay).

The movie has almost nothing to do with the narrative of the Wham! song from which it takes its title, but it uses nearly a dozen George Michael songs as its principal soundtrack, anchored to Kate’s love for the late, tragic rock star. Rather than tracing a romantic betrayal, Last Christmas finds Kate falling in love afresh with the mysterious Tom (Henry Golding, Crazy Rich Asians), whose motto is “look up” — suggesting that most people miss the beauty and details of the world because they’re lost in cellphone screens and their own thoughts.

The movie is a slow burn, divulging the particulars of Kate’s unhappiness as if on a drip — her over-achieving sister who can’t stand her, her possibly ongoing health crisis, her selfishness, her promiscuity and alcohol abuse. The screenplay, credited to Thompson and Bryony Kimmings, teeters on the brink of making Kate unlikeable, using Tom’s nonjudgmental affection for her to keep her in the audience’s good graces.

With countess shots of holiday-lighted streets, director Paul Feig (A Simple Favor, Bridesmaids) initially appears to be mining the Love, Actually, romanticized London vein. But he actually has something else in mind, using the Christmas tropes to balance Kate’s negativity and serving comic side dishes to provide humor and contrast. Kate’s boss, a woman she calls Santa (Michelle Yeoh), has her own little love story, and the homeless shelter to which Tom directs Kate’s attention is full of the usual assortment of characters.

Tom remains more icon of idealized masculinity than a character, but that’s by design. The movie’s real intentions are divulged toward the end in a reveal that will either reduce viewers to happy tears or have them rolling their eyes.

Since it’s Christmas, and Emma Thompson, I leaned toward the tears. Still, the movie is a precarious construction, blending Thompson’s best instincts (give everyone a shot at redemption) with her worst (her caricature of a performance seems to belong to a different movie). It ends with a big, smile-inducing finale that Feig stages with shameless sentimentality appropriate to the holiday genre, which is then tempered by a less saccharine coda.

Whatever you’re expecting when you go into Last Christmas, you’re likely to get something a bit different. But aren’t surprises a holiday tradition as well?

Grade: B. Rated PG-13. Playing at AMC River Hills, Carolina Cinemark, and Regal Biltmore Grande.

(Photo: Jonathan Prime/Universal)