One of the first shots of the new indie movie Lost Holiday features the Jefferson Memorial—but not in the way we’re used to seeing in all those political thrillers, as a crystal-clear, towering symbol of Washington. The stately monument instead appears briefly, seen through a hazy car window at night. You might miss it if you aren’t watching carefully. The shot is key to understanding what brothers Michael and Thomas Matthews are trying to do in their movie.

“I’ve always associated coming home for the holidays with driving around in a car that smells kind of like pot and cigarettes and and seeing everything through that window, that tiny little window, with everything kind of snug and cold at the same time,” says Thomas, 33, who co-directs the film with Michael, 37. Both grew up in Chevy Chase. “As opposed to trying to focus on the monumental qualities of the monuments, [we made it] more or less like, this is our landscape.”

Lost Holiday, now available to rent or buy on demand, is set during one such holiday weekend spent home in the D.C. area. Kate Lyn Sheil (House of Cards, The Girlfriend Experience) stars as Margaret, a young woman who returns home from New York to find that her ex-boyfriend Mark (played by William Jackson Harper, perhaps better known as Chidi on The Good Place) is engaged. In an effort to chase away her winter blues, Margaret enlists her best friend Henry (played by Thomas Matthews) to help her find a local socialite who’s gone missing.

Lost Holiday has played a slew of international film festivals over the past year, and has received mixed reviews along the way (one reviewer called it a “millennial mess with an admittedly solid core of story that shows potential, but sinks under the weight of the ‘whatever'”). The 75-minute movie is a bit tonally muddled, not quite sure if it’s a buddy comedy, a noir mystery, or a drug-fueled holiday story. But some of the local details are particularly rewarding for D.C.-area viewers.

“I think they’re building a condo development here,” says one character during a drive. “It’s only an hour from the Metro!” another quips. In one scene, they point out the Mormon temple that looms over the Beltway; in another, a character’s cup of hot Compass Coffee becomes a weapon.

All the while, the gang listens to NPR on the radio, with actress Emily Mortimer—Thomas’ former co-star on HBO’s The Newsroom—as the host. In fact, local news acts as ambient noise throughout the movie, which makes sense, considering that the directors’ mom is former WJLA reporter Kathleen Matthews. (She appears briefly in Lost Holiday as a TV anchor.)

“The news might be the most D.C. thing about this movie,” says Michael. “We’re that last generation of analog kids, we grew up pre-digital, watching the local news and also picking up the Washington Post.”

One of those local headlines was another inspiration for the movie: a real-life 2006 botched robbery of a Bethesda Smoothie King by a group of affluent high school students. The incident made news for the teenagers’ bungled attempt at stealing only about $400.

“It was like, ‘Why would you do something so incredibly stupid and obviously criminal?'” Michael says. “And the answer was they just didn’t think at the time that the rules applied to them.”

Those kids had something in common with the Matthews’ protagonists, Thomas says, who “have had so much handed to them, and yet they still feel unsatisfied. And we wanted their journey to realize eventually that they’re really not owed any kind of happiness or satisfaction in life.”

To build the “playground-like” landscape of their film, as Thomas describes it, the Matthews brothers shot at locations they frequented as teenagers and on visits home. (Thomas is now based in New York; Michael has settled in the D.C. area.) The brothers went out with a rented 16mm camera during the holidays to secure shots of ZooLights, and spent an afternoon shooting at Great Falls Park. (“It was the winter, so we weren’t really putting anyone out, being as it was cold,” Thomas says.) Another confrontation scene at a fictional Maryland recording studio was filmed at Arlington’s Inner Ear Studio, a favorite of local punk bands.

And since there’s plenty of drinking in this movie, there are also plenty of scenes at D.C.-area bars. The group of friends spends an afternoon at Atomic Billiards in Cleveland Park, and have an LSD-laced night of dancing at (since-closed) The Pinch in Columbia Heights. Several scenes were shot at Rockville’s Hank Dietle’s Tavern shortly before the 2018 fire that shut the bar down. (A rebuilding effort is in the works.) 

Filming at these spots during the 15-day shoot (and, in the case of The Pinch, a cameo from its owner Dan Maceda) was far less high-profile than some other recent movies that have shot in D.C. They got to use most of their locations for free, even if they sometimes had to show up after closing time. “And since it’s such a small crew we got to kind of slip in and slip out,” Thomas says.

All that filming in the D.C. area gave the Matthews brothers a new appreciation for their hometown.

“I think I never really thought of D.C. visually [before this],” Michael says. “But seeing Washington, you know, on celluloid, gave me a sense of it as being even more spare than I thought. … We’re not bombarded with the bustling imagery that cities tend to be.”

As someone who’s left D.C. for a film career in New York, the film seems particularly personal for Thomas. “We were shooting people who were coming home, but they also felt like they were kind of invaders,” he says. “The movie was for sure a love letter to the the place that we grew up.”

Lost Holiday is now available on video on demand. Public screening at The Avalon Theatre January 8 at 8 p.m. Tickets $13. Q&A with Thomas and Michael Matthews to follow.