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Max (Samuel Heller-Seiffert) just wants to be cool, or at the very least, accepted by his peers. Unfortunately, the 12 year old boy has the world’s most embarrassing mother (Mette Horn), and she’s totally wrecking his chances of being a cool dude, at least according to him. Mom’s got a habit of saying all the wrong things at all the wrong times. She dresses funny, she’s too emotionally demonstrative, and she’s writing a book about World War I (ok, that’s not so embarrassing, I suppose).

Max seems resigned to his case of terminal loserdom until a cutie named Ofelia (Ophelia Eriksen) catches his eye in class. But it’s hard to impress a girl when she comes over for dinner and your mother bursts in on you wearing a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles mask.

Of course, it’s hard enough to deal with trying to be cool, getting a girl to like you, and coping with your crazy family at Christmas time. To make matters way worse, Max’s mom invites an ex-con, Carlo (Rasmus Bjerg), to spend the holidays at their house, Max is mortified. Can a boy divorce his mother, he wonders, as his prospects of a normal social life crumble crumbling around him. In an unbelievable twist of fate, Carlo has a connection to Ofelia, and Max ends up stuck between the girl he’s trying to impress and the man who’s unexpectedly staying at his home.

Max’s sullen, melodramatic, woe-is-me attitude is perfectly captured in the film’s deadpan narration, through which he explains his troubles and tries to overcome the brutal injustice of being a 12 year old boy. Thankfully, voiceovers are used sparingly enough to be effective without overwhelming the story, and are occasionally accompanied with a pastiche of home video and stock footage which adds to the nostalgic tone. Samuel Heller-Seiffert’s portrayal of Max is pitch-perfect. With a single eye roll or woebegone look, he captures a level of pre-teen malaise that would have made John Hughes proud.

In a touching (and quite hilarious) climactic scene at the town’s Christmas concert, both Max and Ofelia have to confront what they find most embarrassing about their respective families. Max Embarrassing is one of those rare films that’s made for children, but resonates just as strongly with adults. After all, who among us hasn’t been mortified by something a family member did, once or twice in our lives?