Violent Night proves heart-warmingly sweet and stomach-churningly gory

You can’t ever really imagine families gathering around it on Christmas Day, but Violent Night might just be an instant alternative festive classic. Just as the title suggests he’s going to, director Tommy Wirkola walks the weirdest and finest of lines between heart-warmingly sweet and stomach-churningly violent, and just as Santa in the film mutters about Christmas magic, so too does Wirkola serve up something a little bit special here – not least two of the funniest lines in a film this year. Just wait for the moment someone says “Well, it’s nice to do something as a family at last.” The joke is all in the context.

Violent Night starts off, rather randomly and not very convincingly in Bristol (the film helpfully adds “England”) where an embittered, drunkard Santa is crushing the nuts and knocking back the booze, moaning about the greedy, ever-unsatisfied kids who just want, want, want. Oh, he’s miserable. And he’s truly lost his way. The film is all about helping him find it again. Back in the States on Christmas Eve, it’s Santa’s misfortune – though good fortune, in the end – to stumble into the whopping great mansion of a ghastly mega-rich matriarch who has summoned around her the family she dislikes and who fawn on her in the hope of getting her money.

Among them is the son Jason (Alex Hassell) and his estranged wife (Alexis Louder) who are faking a show of unity for the sake of their daughter Trudy (Leah Brady) whose only real wish for Christmas is that her parents will get back together again.

And then, in the blink of an eye, the entire family is taken hostage by a gang of mercenaries intent of raiding the millions of dollars locked up in the vaults deep down below. And it is into this that our sickened, disheartened Santa tumbles (down the chimney, of course), intent on soaking up yet more booze until he realises that something rather worrying is going on. In the midst of all this ghastliness (and the violence is really pretty gruesome) little Trudy is still clinging to her belief – and it’s through this (and a walkie-talkie) that she connects with Santa who’s still roaming free and might yet be everyone’s saviour.

David Harbour is Santa, a Santa the like of which we’ve never seen before. And inevitably and increasingly strongly he warms to the hope that Trudy holds out – even as, blood stained and dishevelled, he meets violence with violence, rediscovering the skull-crushing warrior he once was several thousand years ago.

It all adds up to the weirdest concoction – but surely no weirder than that awful film a few years ago which took a rather nauseatingly literal take on the lyric “Last Christmas I gave you my heart.” Christmas, it seems, does rather strange things to film-makers.

But in this case, amid all the blood and guts and gore, it really actually works.

Yes, it gets a touch yucky, but the blood shed certainly off-sets it, just as the comedy off-sets (nearly, but not fully) the violence.

It’s not necessarily a film that’s going to warm your cockles, but it’s an entertaining twist.

At times you feel you ought to hate it, but bah humbug, it’s impossible to dislike. At least not too much.