Christmas Karma (2025)
Gurinder Chadha understands cross-cultural storytelling. Bend It Like Beckham proved that. So when she turns her attention to Dickens’ most recycled tale, transforming Scrooge into Eshaan Sood (Kunal Nayyar), a wealthy British-Indian businessman haunted by three very strangely cast ghosts on Christmas Eve, there’s reason to hope. Eva Longoria, Billy Porter, and Boy George as spectral guides? Bold choices. The redemption arc follows Dickens faithfully enough, but Chadha adds something genuinely worthwhile: Sood’s backstory includes the 1972 Ugandan expulsion of its Indian community, then the bitter welcome of racial abuse in Britain despite his citizenship.
That historical weight matters. It could have grounded the whole enterprise. Questions about displacement, belonging, how trauma calcifies into defensive hardness, the way societies pick and choose whose pain deserves acknowledgement. These aren’t light themes. Sood rejects Christmas not from simple meanness but from a deeper tangle of cultural resistance and wounded identity. There’s real substance there.
Then the film tries to become a musical.
The songs are, to put it diplomatically, not good. Some hover in forgettable territory. Others actively test your patience. But the technical issues? Those are harder to excuse. Lip-syncing problems appear throughout, mouths moving at odds with the soundtrack in a way that suggests either budget collapse or some catastrophic post-production miscalculation. The opening numbers suffer from that particular over-processed sound where autotune smothers any human warmth, and the Ghost of Christmas Present sequence reaches for spectacular and lands somewhere closer to baffling. It’s enthusiastic, certainly. Just not… successful.
Nayyar does better work than the material probably deserves. He finds actual depth in Sood, moments of genuine hurt beneath the brittleness. Leo Suter makes Bob Cratchit warm without tipping into saccharine, and the Cratchit family scenes do land emotionally, even if their improbably lovely Notting Hill terrace raises eyebrows. (Apparently Tim being tiny doesn’t preclude his family living in one of London’s priciest postcodes.) The rest of the cast navigates wildly uneven material. Danny Dyer shows up as a singing cab driver, which tells you roughly where the film’s tonal compass has ended up.
Visually, Chadha goes for postcard London: Big Ben, Oxford Street, Winter Wonderland in full festive swing. It’s Curtis-does-Christmas territory, designed to please rather than provoke. The production design excels at one thing, I’ll give it that. Christmas jumpers. So many Christmas jumpers. But you can see the budget straining elsewhere, feel the seams showing.
What frustrates most is the waste. Strip away the musical elements (please), fix the technical disasters, and you’re left with a story about displacement, prejudice, and difficult redemption that actually has something to say. That story exists somewhere in this film. You glimpse it occasionally before another poorly mixed song drowns it out or the editing lurches into another sequence that doesn’t quite work.
Chadha’s instincts about making Dickens speak to contemporary Britain? Sound. The execution of nearly everything around those instincts? Considerably less so.