At one point, Albert opines that violence is sometimes better than sacrifice. His words are familiar, especially in the context of modern Hindi cinema and its reading of love as a dialect of hypermasculinity. That this film chooses to be defined by its journey from violence to sacrifice – from humans to humanity – speaks to its primary identity as a poignant love story. As a result, despite having a plot that winks at its relationship with the viewer, Merry Christmas never feels too plotty. The scenes are long and wordy, almost as if the screenplay is creating space for the heart by taming the physicality of a thriller. There’s a lot of life in between. Shots don’t exist solely to give information or to move the story forward — they unfold on their own terms. For example, in most other movies, an inspector learning about a postmortem report might have been just that — a constable coming in and quickly telling his boss about the report. But here, we see the inspector narrating a fable to his subordinate. The report becomes a footnote, a last-ditch detail, as if to suggest that feeling has very little to do with seeing. Scenes aren’t edited, emotions are. Vivaldi’s ‘The Four Seasons’ scores a climax for the ages. The sequence is somehow everything at once: impossibly romantic, harrowing, hopeful and sad. It’s pure film-making, because at its core it’s just a bunch of people speaking at the police station. The cutting and camerawork internalise the drama and amplify the stakes without any visual or narrative exaggeration. It’s a remarkable achievement, given the co-existence of excess and economy.
The Central Performances
The chemistry between Vijay Sethupathi and Katrina Kaif is so self-contained that it works. Albert and Maria are like soulmates stuck in a parallel universe – they don’t know how much they need each other until they do. When Albert strikes up a conversation early on, her interest looks unlikely. He’s lonely and she’s upset; there’s no reason for her to trust him. But the film smartly writes this implausibility in, keeping us guessing between genuine and fake, plan and impulse, romance and thriller. Kaif nails the ambiguity of a mother disguised as a woman. It’s a performance within a performance, bringing to mind Kareena Kapoor Khan’s track in Jaane Jaan (2023) – a ‘Devotion of Suspect X’ adaptation that Merry Christmas updates in its pursuit of cinema. This is technically a film about Albert, but Sethupathi’s eyes alone make it look like Albert is conceding his story to a bigger cause. He undoes the muscularity of new-age love, turning Albert into a man whose desire adopts the language of remorse.
