Every year, it’s not really Christmas until Netflix drops an absolute clonker of a Christmas movie, and those of us waiting with our noses pressed up against the window in anticipation of something we can laugh at, not with, can finally breathe easy. Like the big red and white Coca Cola truck arriving on our doorsteps, our perverse wish has come agonisingly true, and in the tradition of A Castle for Christmas and last year’s Hot Frosty, here comes My Secret Santa as this year’s cinematic talking point. Directed by Michael Rohl, it’s the number one movie on Netflix as I write this, and my socials are positively bulging with people suggesting I review this memorably mad film.
The elevator pitch? It’s Tootsie meets Mrs Doubtfire, but with a female Santa; how can you go wrong with that? Virgin River’s Alexandra Breckenridge plays Taylor Jacobson, a single mom who is behind on the rent and needs to make money fast to send her teenage daughter to snowboarding school. When she finds out the extortionate fees are halved if she can get a job at a local resort hotel, Taylor senses opportunity, but there are no jobs to be had; the only vacancy is for a Santa Claus, and Santa has to be a man, right? Fortunately Taylor’s super-gay brother and best pal run a special effects and make-up company, and create a latex Santa fat-suit and mask (based on Kurt Russell in Netflix’s own The Christmas Chronicles movies), and so Taylor manages to get her daughter into the snowboard school with the bonus of having a meaningful job where Taylor can help and inspire people as St Nick. But the hotel owner’s boss Matthew Layne (Ryan Eggold) takes a shine to Taylor, and maybe starts to fall for Santa too; as usual with such deceptions, things come to a crunch at a Christmas party when poor Taylor has to attend, not just as herself, but as Santa at the same time!
Alternative title; Hot for Santa; at least My Secret Santa knows it’s silly froth and doesn’t aspire to anything more. But the levels of inanity are still something to behold. Lines like ‘it’s the silent night of the living dead’ suggest some smarts in Ron Oliver and Carly Smale’s script, but brazen plot-driving scenes like the one where Taylor’s landlord reminds her she’s behind on the rent inform us that no cliche will be left unturned. Taylor’s plan doesn’t make sense in that it’s never clear what paperwork would allow her daughter to get into the elite school; Taylor has to create a fictional pseudonym to be her own father, bizarrely named Hugh Mann. So it’s Hugh Mann, the secret Santa that Layne discovers undressing in a toilet cubicle with a gay man; Gay Toilet Sex Santa might be another apposite title for this film, or even the quotable line; ‘I just went down the wrong chimney !’
There’s some seriously subversive imaging and accidental messaging in My Secret Santa that Salvador Dali might have thought was too weird; a child accidentally causes Santa to rupture at the groin and hemorrhage cascades of beans all over the floor, a gushing geyser of hard grains erupting from between his legs. It’s also a ridiculous plot-point that the hotel has ‘no time for a background check’ before appointing Taylor/ Hugh Mann to her post, but since the role of Santa seems to be as a psychological therapist that everyone tells their problems to in this daft movie, it’s hard to understand what the qualification for the job might be. Layne eventually realises that the woman he’s dating and Santa are the same person when he recognises them both using the same chap-stick, and lessons are learned about what a ’real mom’ is. This is a fairly terrible movie that absolutely passes the so bad it’s good test; it’s so silly you literally won’t believe what you’re seeing. Netflix have cornered the market in this kind of Hallmark knock-off; has making risible movies like My Secret Santa really given the streamer a spare 72 billion dollars to spend, or is something odd going on here? Anyway, pour yourself an egg nog, put your feet up and get ready to scoff; it’s no secret that My Secret Santa will provide many of us the gift of laughter over the 2025 festive season.
