Delivery by Christmas is a Polish Christmas comedy that Netflix released on 6 December 2022. Its original title, Jeszcze przed świętami, means roughly “before the holidays”, which tells you the story is a deadline first and a romance second. It runs 97 minutes and was directed by Aleksandra Kułakowska and Maciej Prykowski. The setup is almost a fable. A courier, Marysia Kwiecień (Monika Frajczyk), finds her deliveries sabotaged by a spiteful coworker. A customer who has been helpful to her, Krzysiek (Piotr Pacek), steps in, and together they have to get Christmas presents to the people they were meant for. Everything else hangs on that errand.

The errand is a smart choice, whatever else one says about the film. A courier’s day is already a small drama of doors, signatures and people who are or aren’t home, and the approach of Christmas gives the story a clock without any need for invented stakes. Nobody here is saving the world. A parcel arrives or it doesn’t, and somebody is pleased or disappointed. The film stays at that scale, and that is why the premise holds up even when the execution is ordinary. It also leaves a quiet point about work: the person who brings other people their holiday is rarely the one who gets to enjoy it.

Frajczyk carries the film. She plays Marysia as a working courier under pressure, not as a quirky heroine, and her practical stubbornness suits someone chasing misdelivered parcels. Marysia has a son, Maks, played by Franciszek Krupowicz, and his presence reminds us that she has a life beyond the route. Pacek’s Krzysiek is the easier part, a good-natured helper, and he plays it with an ease that keeps the character from turning syrupy. The two work well as a pair. Whether that adds up to romance in the full sense is a harder question. The genre label promises one, and the film seems to arrive at it by habit rather than by building it.

The cast around them is wider than the plot can use. Dorota Kolak plays Estera and Mirosław Baka plays Ernest. Barbara Jonak and Łukasz Simlat play Mariola and Michał, the parents of Mirek (Łukasz Gawroński). Zdzisław Wardejn appears as Alojzy, Krzysiek’s grandfather, and Zuzanna Puławska plays a police constable, Barbara Pasterz. A delivery story gives every character a doorstep and a short scene, so the film becomes a procession of small appearances. That suits an episodic comedy, and it keeps the pace brisk. It also means that most of these people never get past a sketch. The family scenes, in particular, show how much a gathering of this size could add if it were given room to breathe, and the plot, built around its two leads, rarely stops long enough to let it.

The weaknesses are the familiar ones of the season. The tone sits between gentle comedy and sentiment and doesn’t commit to either. The Decider review summed it up fairly: a little silly, probably not as moving as it wants to be, but getting by on modest charms. I would agree with every clause. The silliness is forgivable. The missing emotional weight is harder to excuse, because a film about returning gifts to their owners needs at least one moment where a gift matters deeply to someone, and the outcome here feels foregone almost from the start.

Still, I don’t want to be unkind to something that sets out to be small and stays small. Christmas films tend to be judged by whether they feel like a warm room, and this one mostly does. The leads are likable, and the structure, a race to return what was meant for someone else, carries a decent idea about generosity as a kind of labour. That idea never quite becomes an argument, but it is there, and it gives the errand some dignity.

So this is a film for a December evening, not for a year-end list. It asks for ninety-odd minutes and gives back a mild, kind comedy with two pleasant leads and a premise better than its script. For a seasonal commission, that is a respectable result.