In The Holdovers, Paul Hunham, is a universally disliked professor at a prep school called Barton Academy. With no family and nowhere to go around the holidays in 1970, he stays on campus to supervise students who couldn’t go home. After a few days, only one person is left: a troublemaking 17-year-old named Angus, a good student whose bad behavior always threatens to get him expelled. Along with the school’s head cook Mary, whose own son was recently lost in Vietnam, the three form an unlikely bond as they spend Christmas together during two very snowy weeks in New England.