Christmas With The Singh's

Christmas With The Singhs (2024) - Hallmark

Asha (Anuja Joshi) is a hardworking Chicago-based nurse practitioner helping children with disabilities hang ornaments on Christmas Eve at her hospital. Jake (Ben Hollingsworth) is a dedicated sports reporter for the Chicago Newspaper. While interviewing some local personalities—dang, I can't name a single current Chicago Bulls player. Does DeMar DeRozan still play for them? Anyway, Jake slips and falls on some ice while helping an old lady and ends up in the emergency room, being treated by none other than Asha. It turns out these two attended the same high school back in the day. She remembers him immediately. He remembers her eventually. But the girl is a cutie, so Jake wastes no time asking her out after he gets patched up. Asha accepts. Quick. C'mon baby, you want to at least pretend to think about it for a moment. Anyway, it's a glorious night for these two, ending with a kiss on Asha's doorstep. No near-miss kiss here, my friends. If this were a Lifetime Christmas movie, they would've continued this inside, but it's a Hallmark Christmas movie, so this is where it ends for the night.

TIME PASSING LOVE MONTAGE! Dinners, movies, walks, talks, and whatever else we can squeeze into a 60-second love montage, ending with a whole year passing and Jake on bended knee asking for Asha's hand in marriage. Now, we love a montage, especially one where time passes because it saves us the trouble of dealing with a lot of peripheral stuff we don't want to see. But apparently, during this year, these two kids didn't meet each other's parents, didn't talk about potential family planning, and as we will soon learn, didn't talk about much of anything regarding their potential future lives, leading us to wonder what they were doing with each other in that year. Nope, not nonstop sex because, as we would also learn, they've been out of high school for eighteen years, which would put them in their mid-30s. People in their mid-30s, with their 40s around the corner, aren't trying to bump it all the time. What, pray tell, were they talking about during these dinners and walks?

Cool. She says yes, of course, but she is a little concerned because he didn't ask for her father's consent, because that's something people do in 2024. But I'm sure it'll all work out when they head back to tiny town for the holidays.

No, no, it's not gonna all work out because this is that rare romantic holiday movie where we actually have a villain to deal with, and that villain would be Asha's old man, Samuel (Manaj Sood). Some might say it's just a father protecting his daughter. I don't think so. Almost all fathers protect their daughters; this is just a bad dude.

Samuel gives poor Jake the business from the moment he steps in the house—the blatant disrespect of his mere existence, making him eat spicy food he can't handle, forcing the height-averse Jake to climb a ladder to change Christmas lights, which almost killed him, continually oppressing his daughter, and on it goes. This isn't helped by Asha's mom, Nirmila (Nimet Kanji), being a super sweet angel walking the earth, or that Asha's sister-in-law, Sarah (Rami Kahlon), is smoking hot. Admittedly, that doesn't have much to do with anything, but we thought we would throw that in there anyway.

The movie would also have us believe that Jake's divorced parents, Jake Sr. (Greg Rogers) and Molly (Michelle Scarabelli), are problematic, but not really. They are trying to make things work the best they can, but Samuel isn't having any of this civility.

So things aren't going great for our young couple, with everything coming to a head at the annual Church Christmas story. Samuel reads a church story to the kids and demands that Asha and Jake not be late for this. However, they were late because they had an emergency to play Mary and Joseph at Jake's mom's annual Christmas bazaar. Well, when they finally get there, Samuel completely loses his stuff and goes off on everybody—Asha, Jake, Jake's parents—and of course, Jake defends them, which leads to Asha having to defend her unreasonable father, leading to our couple breaking up. Now Samuel realizes that playing the part of Beelzebub at Christmas isn't very Christian and has to make things right by apologizing to everybody. This leads to Jake having a 'Say Anything' moment, performing a Bollywood dance in front of Asha's house while holding a boombox and ending with our young couple making out while the snow falls at Christmas.

So while Christmas With The Singhs is filled with contrivances and improbabilities, which aren't problems actually, just genre standards, there are a couple of things that make it work. One of these things would be an attention to detail. For instance, when you enter the Singhs' home, one can't help but notice the artwork, furniture, heirlooms, and other subtle touches which deliver the experience that you are in the home of an actual Indian family, which gives the movie an air of authenticity. I figured that could only be pulled off by either a director of Indian descent or at least the set designer, but the director is Panta Mosleh, so I bow to you, Ms. Mosleh, for your attentive eye. Of course, I would defer to someone of actual Indian descent to confirm this, like Spicy Means Kara! She's a YouTuber who focuses on these kinds of things in the Indian community. I wonder if she watched this?

The other thing that works, and this is the main thing for all of these movies, no matter how rote or predictable or improbable they may be, but what ultimately sinks them or allows them to swim is whether or not you buy into our couple as a couple. Anuja Joshi and Ben Hollingsworth actually seemed like a young couple in love, and that goes a long way in making these movies effective in the constrictive space they have to work in.

The vomit-worthiness was also pretty high as well. No near-miss kisses since we had to get these two engaged pretty quick, but we did have hot cocoa drinking, all kinds of baking, and we had cultural caroling on maybe a sitar or something? I don't know what that instrument was, but I know Kara Means Spicy would know! We had lots of tree decorating, gingerbread house making, we had lots of cute kids running around, and plenty of old people dispensing old people wisdom. Even the evil Samuel eventually. All we needed for max vomits was some snow festivities such as snowball fights, snow angels, or making a snowman, but that will always be difficult to do for movies shot in July and August.

All in all, Christmas With the Singhs wasn't so bad. A good time with some nice people, except for that one dude, of course, with a little added cultural spice for the holidays.