My Santa (2019)

Released on Christmas Day 2019, My Santa is a Malayalam-language family film from Kerala that does something genuinely unusual for Indian cinema: it takes the Santa Claus mythology seriously. Not as parody, not as background decoration, but as the central emotional mechanism of an entire feature. Director Sugeeth, who built his career on crowd-pleasing comedies like Ordinary (2012) and Shikkari Shambhu (2018), attempts here a more tender register. The result is a film that earns its warmth but tests your patience getting there.

The Setup: A Child, a Santa, and a Screenplay That Takes Its Time

Aisa Elizabeth Jacob, a second-grader played by Manasvi Kottachi, has lost her father, mother, and grandmother in an accident. She lives with her grandfather and holds onto one conviction: Santa Claus is real, and if she can just reach him, he will make things right. Abel Abraham Thekkan, played by Dileep, is the man who ends up in the red suit, drawn into Aisa's life to fulfill wishes he had no plan to take on.

The film's best quality is that it treats the child's belief without condescension. Aisa is not a prop for adult sentiment. Her logic, her specific wishes, her relationship with her grandfather and her school friend Anna Teresa, these are rendered with enough specificity to feel like an actual child's inner world rather than a screenwriter's sketch of one. Credit goes to writer Jemin Cyriac, who grounds the supernatural premise in concrete domestic detail.

The weakness is the pacing. At 147 minutes, My Santa is about 25 minutes too long for its material. Sugeeth stages several comedy sequences involving Abel's reluctant transformation into the Santa role, and while Dileep handles the physical comedy with his usual competence, these scenes feel like obligations to the star's established persona rather than necessities of the story. Dileep by 2019 had appeared in well over 150 films, most of them built around his slapstick timing, and My Santa cannot quite decide whether it wants to be his kind of film or something quieter.

Dileep and the Weight of Context

There is no honest review of a Dileep film from this period that ignores the circumstances. In July 2017, he was arrested and named as the eighth accused in a criminal conspiracy case involving the abduction and assault of a prominent Malayalam actress. He spent 85 days in jail before receiving bail. By Christmas 2019, when My Santa opened, the trial was ongoing. His filmography after 2017 consists largely of films that did not find major box office traction.

This context does not change what appears on screen. But it does explain something about the film's strange tonal insistence, the way it pushes very hard on Dileep's image as a gentle, self-sacrificing figure who gives of himself for a vulnerable child. It is possible to watch the film and find that story genuinely affecting. It is also difficult not to notice the casting choices at work.

Kerala as Christmas Country

The film's most interesting quality for international viewers is what it reveals about Christmas in Kerala. Christians make up approximately 18 percent of Kerala's population, the highest proportion of any Indian state, and the Christmas traditions there carry centuries of history. The Syrian Christian communities of Kerala trace their origins to the missionary journeys of the Apostle Thomas in 52 AD. This is not a region where Christmas arrived with British colonialism; it predates the British presence by well over a millennium.

My Santa does not make this history explicit, but it absorbs it. The film's Kerala Christmas looks nothing like a Hallmark special. There are no snow-covered streets. The decorations are luminous but tropical. The feast traditions involve appam and fish molly alongside plum cake. The Santa mythology grafts onto a culture that has its own deep Christian roots, and the film treats this synthesis as entirely natural, because in Kerala, it is.

Vidyasagar's score supports this syncretic quality. Known across Tamil and Malayalam cinema as the "Melody King," Vidyasagar has composed for over 225 films and won a National Film Award. His music for My Santa leans into the children's choir register, which suits the material, and the songs are the element that Kerala audiences praised most warmly when the film opened.

What Works, What Doesn't

Manasvi Kottachi carries the film. Her performance is restrained in the way that only a director who genuinely worked with child actors achieves, rather than the performed cuteness that derails most family productions. The scene in which Aisa lists her wishes to the man she believes is actually Santa is the emotional peak of the film, and it lands because she plays it without sentimentality.

The supporting cast, including Anusree, Kalabhavan Shajohn, Sunny Wayne, and Indrans, populates the neighborhood with credible warmth. These are not characters who exist to admire the lead; they have their own texture. Aju Varghese appears in a cameo that the film treats as a reward for attentive viewers of Malayalam comedy.

The screenplay's structure is the main problem. The film front-loads its comedy in the first hour and its emotion in the second, and the transition between the two modes is clumsy. By the time the film reaches its most affecting moments, some goodwill has already been spent. A tighter edit would have produced a considerably stronger film.

Wall Poster Entertainment, the production banner, secured satellite rights with Zee Keralam and the film now streams on ZEE5. It has found a second life there as family holiday viewing, which is probably its ideal context: a couch, a Kerala plum cake, and no particular obligation to check the runtime before you start.