Séamas O'Reilly: Every Irish character in Irish Wish has the wrong accent or nothing to say
Irish Wish: Every character is an uncanny, half-dimensional version of a trope you’ve seen elsewhere.
Netflix’s centres on book editor Maddie, played by Lindsay Lohan, who’s secretly in love with her star author – and hunky Irishman – Paul Kennedy.
Lovelorn in Ireland as she prepares to watch him marry her best friend Emma, she chances upon an uncanny meadow. There she is set upon by Dawn Bradfield, best known as Lovely Girl Imelda in , here playing a chaotic witch who hovers around rural Ireland granting wishes to visiting Americans for reasons unknown.
Maddie’s wish, her , is simple: she wishes it was she that was marrying Paul.
An audible twinkle of irishfairydust.mp3 resounds on the score, and Maddie wakes up to discover that she is, indeed, betrothed to her crush: but will a chance encounter with a roguish photographer make her realise her heart was in the wrong place all along?
The ramifications of Maddie's wish are slightly confusing, even horrifying.
She emerges into a world where everyone, including Paul’s erstwhile fiancée Emma, have lived an entirely different period of time – weeks, months, years? – than she experienced during their purported courtship.
She has no memory of any conversations or events that have taken place during their engagement, a situation which only gets more insane the more you think about it, but which strangely only presents extremely minor difficulties.
All the usual trappings of the genre follow; trivial misunderstandings, bucolic landscapes, interior shots that are lit like a Nurofen ad, and a romantic triangle in which two different flavours of non-threatening male love interest are pursued by a woman who can’t stop falling over.
On that latter point, the “klutz” shorthand is common in any film wishing to present their scatter-brained heroine as useless without the man she needs to pull her life together, but here it gestures toward serious cognitive impairment.
Within the first twenty minutes of the film, Maddie has a scarf ripped off her throat by a fleeing taxi, bumps into a priceless heirloom, is knocked flat on her arse while attempting to grab the wrong suitcase, ends up flat on her arse a second time after tripping over her actual suitcase, and crashes a bike into a fence while cycling at roughly 3 miles an hour.
Then again, everyone in this film seems lightly brain-damaged.
When she confesses to her best friend Heather – a sentient wall of placeholder text – that her reality is based on a witch’s curse, Heather responds like a concussed cyborg, failing to intuit the very severe mental illness such an utterance would suggest to any normal person, let alone your dearest friend. It is never mentioned again.
Every character is an uncanny, half-dimensional version of a trope you’ve seen elsewhere.
Most at some point emerge into scenes loudly declaring what they’d just been talking about for the benefit of the viewer, and the use of dubbing is so frequent as to be distracting.
There are only so many times a person can momentarily leave frame only for a transplanted utterance like “thehappycouplearetakingusonapicnic” or “hesaidweshouldscoutlocationswithouthim” to emerge from the back of their heads at the velocity of the disclaimers at the end of an American pharmaceutical ad, before you begin to feel your brain shifting around inside your skull like a cat settling in for a nap.
Perhaps most striking is the relative lack of Irish people in the film at all.
This is a movie about love in which sex is absent – when Paul attempts to share their bed, she beats the ever-loving shite out of him, in a moment that’s played for laughs because , and scored like a scene in which a puppy tries to climb some stairs – but it’s also a film which fetishises Irish men while forgetting to include any.
As a beautiful Irish man myself, I’m broadly OK with Irish men being fetishised.
For too long, I’ve wanted to see my lilting brogue and soft, poet’s eyes right up there on the screen, and it would be churlish for me to denounce this phenomenon now.
But here, the main Irishman is Paul, a Big House Irish aristocrat type who lives in a stately home, played by Welshman Alexander Vlahos with an accent that’s not so much awful as homeopathic.
God knows how many times he had to do a take of the words “beard balm”. His mother seems to be English (?) while his father is fully Irish.
His brother Kory is clearly from a different part of Ireland from any of the above-mentioned people, despite their being immediate family.
Their house, it turns out, is so big it spans fourteen counties.
Every ancillary Irish character has either the wrong accent or nothing to say, and those which feature in the film’s pub scenes could have been written in 1935, had ChatGPT been invented then.
English love interest James is played with boyish elan by star, and walking anagram, Ed Speelers, who – like Lohan, to be fair – makes the best of the stilted, chaste repartee they’re offered.
It sounds like I’m joking, but the best line reading in the entire film is undoubtedly his bravura delivery of “After this job, I’m off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard”. If there was an Oscar for “Best Actor, considering” he’d have to be in contention.
It all makes for a film that has the weight and heft of a screen saver, with very little to say about love, magic, and least of all Ireland, and which ejects from your brain like mist as the credits roll.
Getting angry with would be like drawing a picture of Dracula and getting scared of it.
It is non-culture. An unfilm. A complex series of tax and contract arrangements for which the involvement of cameras was entirely superfluous.
If, having watched it, your most ardent desire is that you could erase it from your memory, give it about 48 hours.
Your wish, your Irish wish, shall be granted.
