‘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.