Irish Wish (2024)

Netflix has returned to the well, and the well is Ireland. Irish Wish follows Maddie Kelly, a book editor who pines for the author she has spent a year quietly improving, only to watch him fall for her best friend on the eve of an Irish wedding. A wish on a bench summons a fairy who is later revealed to be Saint Brigid, and Maddie wakes as the bride. The arrangement is a disaster, as wishes tend to be. The film knows this and says so with the gentle insistence of a fortune cookie.

The casting is modestly inclusive: two women of color appear as close friends beside a white lead, and the film never remarks on it, which is its own quiet virtue. The story belongs to a woman, was directed by a woman, and ends with Maddie refusing to ghost-edit another man's novels without a co-writer credit. That is a real, if small, assertion of professional self-respect. The moral, something about wanting what we need instead of what we want, arrives soft and unhurried. No sermon follows it.

Beyond that stretch, the cupboards are bare. No romantic subtext for anyone of any persuasion. No engagement with race as a subject. No climate sermon, despite a wildlife photographer in the cast. No class critique, no body-image commentary, no neurodivergence, and no history worth revising. Saint Brigid is deployed as folklore and magic, not as a thesis. Everything else is a competent, scenic, deeply familiar romantic comedy that wishes for very little and receives exactly that. Lohan glows. Ireland glows more. The score, I assume, was lovely.