‘Christmas Karma’ is a Bollywood reimagining of Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’, and I went in rather sceptically, not least because of the uniformly terrible reviews it has received. The first twenty minutes didn’t help: it feels like a parody of a parody, complete with a singing taxi driver and a tone that wobbles uncomfortably close to pantomime. But then the film suddenly reveals its hand, delivering an unexpectedly rich and inventive modern-day variation on the Scrooge story.

Here, Scrooge is reimagined as someone whose family were exiled from Uganda in the 1970s – a clever and surprisingly moving backstory. It fits the classic template beautifully: a man shaped by early trauma, who learns that the only way to survive a prejudiced Britain of the 1980s is to harden himself, equate worth with wealth, and close himself off from romance, community, and even Christmas.

Directed by Gurinder Chadha – of ‘Bend It Like Beckham’ fame – the film centres on a London that is proudly multicultural, yet still full of social and racial fault lines. There’s a lovely irony in the way our protagonist, raised in a Hindu household, sees Christmas as “not his festival,” while everyone around him – including his own Asian family – delight in celebrating it. The film even opens with a grime-infused rap about the cost-of-living crisis, signalling that this is a very 2020s take on Dickens.

The casting is full of surprises. Boy George appears as the Ghost of Christmas Future – silent, spectral, but oddly perfect. And the film doesn’t shy away from big emotional beats: the Ugandan expulsion storyline brings real poignancy, and the Bob Cratchit–Tiny Tim arc is reimagined through Pixie Lott and her seriously ill son, who needs impossibly expensive Swiss healthcare. It’s genuinely affecting, even if the family’s supposedly straitened circumstances don’t quite convince when they appear to live in a rather lovely Notting Hill townhouse.

For all its unevenness, ‘Christmas Karma’ is far from a one-note retelling. It has something distinctive to say about migration, identity, and the price of survival, all wrapped in a colourful, heartfelt, song-filled Dickensian update.