Following a brutal attack on Christmas Eve, Natalie finds herself waking up from a coma nearly a year later, just in time for the holiday season to restart. She isn’t just dealing with physical wounds, but also the trauma that no one believes her attacker was Santa Claus – worse still, they believe her injuries self inflicted. When she and her friends head up to a secluded snowy cabin, Natalie struggles to return to a changed world, which gets even tougher when a Holly jolly killer comes around.

Another entry in the ‘killer who is actually the real Santa Claus’ category, Santa Isn’t Real is a passionate indie Slasher that gets bogged down in a few missteps. The elephant in the room being that Natalie wakes up from a year long coma and is walking within the next few days, which is medically next to impossible. I know that it’s to get her back out with her friends for Christmas and not have the whole movie be about her physical therapy, but it strains believability, especially as the movie goes on.

It’s pointless to say that the movie looks cheap, it’s an indie Slasher about a killer Santa for God’s sake, but I think that actually works with the movie, not against it. Santa Isn’t Real is a surprisingly atmospheric movie, and the isolation of the classic snowy cabin works with a more limited visual style. It feels claustrophobic and that makes a lot of sense here. Additionally, the performances were shockingly good for this level of production with Natalie in particular having some good moments.

The ending was a bit rushed and I wouldn’t have minded another 15-20 minutes of resolution, because the cliffhanger-ish ending is a fun one, I wanted to see where it was going. It’s interesting that I seem to be in the minority of opinion here because most other critical reaction to this movie has been quite harsh, but I enjoyed Santa Isn’t Real quite a bit. Maybe it’s because I watched Megalopolis right before it and that destroyed my brain so thoroughly that anything with a coherent plot line seemed like Shakespeare. Maybe it’s because this is actually a hidden gem tucked away on Tubi. The world may never know.