I BELIEVE IN SANTA

I BELIEVE IN SANTA is a romantic comedy on Netflix about a single mom and magazine writer who hates Christmas but falls for a lawyer who’s obsessed with Santa and Christmas, and how their beliefs clash, causing rifts in their romance. I BELIEVE IN SANTA has lots of laidback charm and sweetness overall, but the lawyer isn’t religious and says Santa’s the important figure of Christmas, not Jesus, and the movie includes a few other problems, including eight light profanities.

Lisa (Christina Moore) is a single mom and magazine writer who hates Christmas but always is assigned to write essays on holidays. Lisa meets a lawyer named Tom (John Ducey) when he helps her daughter, Ella, when Ella gets lost at a Fourth of July event.

She soon learns that Tom is in love with the secular side of Christmas and those traditions, especially Santa, and that he’s way over the top in his enthusiasm and really needs to grow up. She’s stunned by this revelation on their first date but seeing him as a source of material for her article, she continues dating him.

Lisa soon finds herself having fun with Christmas traditions again, as John’s best friend, Assan (Sachin Bhatt), and her best friend, Sharon (Lateefah Holder), watch bemused. Assan warns Tom that perhaps he shouldn’t inform Lisa of his biggest secret, that he actually believes Santa is real even though he’s in his 30s.

As Lisa’s daughter Ella (Violet McGrew) becomes really attached to Tom, Lisa is concerned that Tom keeps telling her not to lose her faith in Santa. Tom’s also set up 25 straight nights of Santa and Christmas-related activities. The schedule finally drives Lisa crazy, and she breaks up with him.

Can Tom win Lisa back? Will Lisa ever come to love Christmas?

I BELIEVE IN SANTA is a low-key charmer. It’s clearly low-budget and at times a little slow. However, as the movie continues, viewers will come to love the characters due to fun performances by the two leads and all the supporting cast. Director Alex Ranaverdo is good at keeping the movie going, even though it relies on dialogue more than activity and occasionally drops in montages that are annoying in their sticky-sweetness.

The movie more than makes up for those small weaknesses with a spectacular sleigh race where Tom creates a realistic, Santa-worthy sleigh out of cardboard boxes for Ella. The scene is tremendous fun.

The one problematic area is that Tom on two or three occasions delivers speeches where he talks about faith being vital, but it’s faith in Santa, not Jesus, that he espouses. He says adults say Santa’s not real because there’s no proof for his existence but some of those same adults embrace organized religion even though there’s no proof God exists.

However, Lisa says Tom taught her of the importance of faith “in things bigger than ourselves” without specifically mentioning God or Jesus. Also, in one scene, Tom’s Muslim friend, Assan, makes the false claim that Islam is the same as Christianity when he speaks of how he was bullied as a child “even though we’re all the same.” In that scene, he also says faith is a general principle that can unite all people because all people have faith in something of one kind or another.

Apart from the issues of Christmas, Santa Claus and faith, I BELIEVE IN SANTA contains several other problems that are really unnecessary. It has eight light profanities, a scene where an engaged couple leave a living room to go upstairs into the woman’s bedroom, and a quick line of dialogue where the male lead’s friend says he can find some “cute guys” at a community-wide event. The vast majority of the scenes in I BELIEVE IN SANTA, however, are rather wholesome and family friendly.