There comes a time in every woman’s life when she finds herself, exhausted and spent, slumped on her couch ready to watch something mindless on Netflix for a few hours.

It is for this very reason that Netflix has commissioned its brace of guilty pleasure Christmas movies, which started last year with A Christmas Prince and continue this year with that movie’s sequel, the unimaginatively titled A Christmas Prince 2: Royal Wedding as well as The Holiday Calendar, The Christmas Chronicles and The Princess Switch.

These movies are all of a piece, as mindlessly consuming as a bowl of Maltesers and all as deliciously guilty as the next. Like a Michael Bublé album or a box of Quality Street, you know exactly what you’re going to get with one of these Christmas movies. Enlisting every beloved romcom trope - from life-swap storylines and atagonistic love interests to sassy best friends - these movies are predictable in a cosy, worn-in kind of way.

Take The Princess Switch, for example. There’s nothing particularly new in the plot, which is essentially the lovechild of The Parent Trap and The Princess Diaries right down to the secret handshake and makeover montage, but that doesn’t make it any less enjoyable. And amidst all that cheese and all that formula-following is buried treasure, an empowering message and a fantastically feminist ending that is a step in the right direction when it comes to romantic comedies.

The surprisingly empowering message at the heart of Netflix’s new Christmas movie