‘Wild Mountain Thyme’ Film Review: Relentless Charm Offensive Makes Irish-Set Rom-Com Hard to Resist
Writer-director John Patrick Shanley pivots back and forth from sweet to sticky, but Emily Blunt and Jamie Dornan help make the concoction palatableAlonso Duralde | December 9, 2020 @ 4:00 PM
Kerry Brown/Bleecker Street
“Wild Mountain Thyme” opens with fiddles playing over a narrator saying “Welcome to Ireland” before promptly announcing that he’s dead — and that’s just the beginning of the bottomless pot of Irish charm that writer-director John Patrick Shanley dips into for this breezy romantic comedy.
Audiences may find themselves captivated or irritated — or, more likely, some combination of the two — over the hundred or so minutes that follow, but the film takes such a circuitous route down a familiar path, and does so with such wit and eccentricity, that the experience as a whole becomes harder and harder to resist.