I am not Irish.
I want to be clear about this upfront, because the editors of this magazine — specifically one Scott Meadow, a man who assigns international travel the way most people send passive-aggressive emails — apparently believe that growing up in Brooklyn constitutes sufficient cultural preparation for the Republic of Ireland. I was raised in Flatbush. I knew Irish people. I ate at a pub called Clancy's on Flatbush Avenue every St. Patrick's Day until I was twenty-six. I once watched a man in a green hat argue about the offside rule for four hours. He was wrong. He remained convinced. In my own words, delivered to Meadow directly before boarding: "I'm not Irish. I was raised in Brooklyn, so I know Irish people. I love Guinness and I'd like to go home."
He sent me anyway. He always does. There is a particular species of editor who believes that displacement produces insight. Meadow is this species. He is probably right, which is the most irritating thing about him, and I've been counting.
The Galway Film Fleadh — which the Irish pronounce "Flaw," as in your fundamental personal failings, which feels appropriate for a film festival — is held each July along the western coast of Ireland, in a city that smells of rain and ambition and something faintly maritime that I have chosen not to investigate further. It is not Cannes. It is not Venice. It is not Berlin, nor Sundance, nor any of the festivals at which I have suffered for my art. What it is, and I say this without irony for perhaps the first time in my professional career, is genuine. The cinema house where I caught the world premiere of Murphy vs Christmas seated approximately three hundred people, most of whom appeared to personally know the cast. This is not a criticism. This is something the so-called prestige festivals, with their yachts and their lanyards and their cold-brew cortados served in recyclable cups that still end up in the Mediterranean, have forgotten how to manufacture.
The Guinness, by the way, flows freely. I mention this not as a lifestyle detail but as a critical observation: alcohol consumed before a film about an Irishman's war with the mythology of Santa Claus creates a particular emotional permeability that I have since been unable to fully close — one that I believe Alex Fegan — the director, a man clearly working at the intersection of Cassavetes and kitchen-sink realism and something distinctly, unapologetically Hibernian — would appreciate.
The film itself.
Eoin Murphy, as rendered by Johnny Elliott in a performance of such unguarded, self-defeating sincerity that something in my left ventricle asked to be excused, is a Dublin street photographer. He documents litter. This is either a metaphor for the detritus of modern consumerism or simply a job with terrible prospects; Fegan, wisely, refuses to adjudicate. Murphy is also a man in open, implacable warfare with Christmas.
Not with the religious observance. Not with the theology. With the myth. With Santa Claus, that red-suited engine of commercial manipulation and parental complicity, that annual fog machine of false wonder. Murphy wants it stopped. He wants children told the truth. He is wrong to want this — or perhaps he is right — but he wants it with the kind of conviction that in a different century would have had him nailing documents to church doors.
The inciting incident is devastating in its domesticity: his daughter Anna wants him to make rice krispy cakes for her school Christmas party. He makes granola buns with jam instead. They are, by all cinematic evidence, terrible. Anna receives them with the expression of a child who has just learned something permanent about her father. Murphy cannot explain that the rice krispy cake is, to him, a vehicle for the same mindless capitulation to seasonal mythology that he finds aesthetically and philosophically intolerable. He just stands there, holding his sad buns, looking like a man who has argued himself into a corner. The buns are not helping.
It gets worse. It always gets worse. He tells Anna the truth about Santa. Anna, being a child and therefore a vector of information that moves faster than any billboard, tells her classmates. Murphy is called before the school headmaster. He is called before a judge. He takes out an actual billboard — SANTA CLAUS DOES NOT EXIST, in large, unapologetic type — and becomes, seemingly overnight, public enemy number one in a country that takes its mythology with the same seriousness it takes its football.
The masterstroke, and I use this word having deployed it maybe twice in forty years of criticism, is John Connors. Connors plays every authority figure in Murphy's life: the harsh father in traumatic flashbacks, the headmaster, the judge. He wears different wigs. He deploys different accents. He is, in some shots, not disguised at all, and the film dares you to notice. This should be a gimmick. In lesser hands it would be a gimmick. Instead it becomes the film's central argument: that Murphy is not fighting Christmas, not fighting the billboard company that eventually removes his sign, not fighting the legal system that threatens him with contempt charges. He is fighting his father. He has always been fighting his father. The authority figures who oppose him are all the same authority figure. Connors, to his enormous credit, plays this with just enough variation that the joke never collapses into mere schtick and just enough sameness that the point lands with the weight of a verdict.
Tania Notaro, as Claire the barrister who finds Murphy's bluster more amusing than threatening, provides the film's only real oxygen. Their scenes together have a screwball quality that Fegan seems almost embarrassed by — he cuts away too quickly, returns to the bleakness before the lightness has fully metabolized. This is the film's primary weakness: it trusts its darkness more than its warmth, and the warmth, when it finally arrives in the final act, feels somewhat earned but also somewhat belated, like a friend who shows up to your crisis three days late with a casserole and a parking ticket.
The visual language is black and white — or, as someone in the post-screening conversation described it, "black and silver," which is both more poetic and more accurate. Fegan shoots Dublin and Galway (the film cheats geography; this is forgivable) as a place of long, accumulating grays. The documentary aesthetic — few cuts, medium to long shots, a camera that watches more than it editorializes — gives Murphy's chaos a quality of inevitability, as though we are watching a document of something that actually happened. The stylistic flourishes — doppelgangers of the father bleeding into present-day scenes, ghosts accruing at the edges of Murphy's vision — feel, in lesser moments, like Bergman borrowed without a library card. In stronger moments, they feel like the only honest visual language available for a film about a man who cannot escape his own inheritance.
Here is what I, a man from Brooklyn who knew Irish people and understood none of them, took from Murphy vs Christmas:
The anti-Christmas film is the most misunderstood genre in cinema. We frame it as cynicism. We mistake the critique of mythology for an attack on warmth. Murphy is not anti-Christmas. Murphy is anti-lie. He is a man so damaged by the particular authority of his father — an authority that demanded he believe things that were not true and feel things that were not felt — that he cannot watch his daughter be asked to participate in a collective fiction without experiencing it as violation.
Whether you find this sympathetic or exhausting will determine whether you find Murphy vs Christmas a masterwork or a trial. I found it, improbably, both. I sat in a cinema house in Galway, Ireland, a city I had never visited, among three hundred people who might have been the cast members' relatives, holding a pint I had smuggled in with a confidence I did not entirely feel, and I watched an Irishman destroy Christmas and partially reconstruct it and I thought: this is what film is for.
Not the spectacle. Not the franchise. Not the IP. This: one man's war with the story he was told, conducted in black and silver, on streets that look like rain made permanent.
Meadow was right to send me. I will not tell him this.
Murphy vs Christmas world-premiered at the Galway Film Fleadh 2026. No wider release date has been confirmed at time of writing. Alex Fegan directed. Johnny Elliott stars. The granola buns looked genuinely terrible.
— J. Esiskel, Galway