For years, I have cheerfully covered the Netflix Christmas Cinematic Universe–Industrial Complex, consuming its endless exports with the assumption that, in the end, it was all harmless fun, just a series of categorically but admirably bad movies about fake monarchies and horny yet prude journalists. Now that I have seen Netflix’s latest film, Irish Wish, I realize I have been but a hapless pawn in a larger sociopolitical plot to maintain the status quo, quell dissent, replace much of the workforce with AI, install a permanent Christian theocratic dictator, and make Ireland look weird for some reason.
Irish Wish is not technically a Netflix Christmas movie, but it shares all of the genre’s hallmarks: It’s vaguely holiday-themed (I’m inferring the St. Patrick’s Day connection based on the film’s release date and the fact that it has no other reason to take place in Ireland), everyone in it dresses like they have only ever shopped on amazon.com on Cyber Monday, there is no sex or sexual chemistry to speak of despite the entire plot hinging on the possibility thereof, and every scene is lit and color coded like a poorly managed children’s hospital.
The primary difference here, however, is that Irish Wish is a thinly veiled Trojan horse for the conservative agenda, a crypto-fascist work of art cluttered with right-wing dog whistles and dialogue that could have only been written by a malevolently programmed artificial intelligence. I attempted to identify and examine its most troubling moments, which ended up being the entire movie from start to finish, which I watched twice while feeling the walls of reality melt around me.
1. The film begins with both text and voice-over defining the word wish, for those unfamiliar: “Wish (verb): To want something that cannot or will not happen.” The voice-over continues ominously, Irishly — “But what if it does …?” This is the first of thousands of indicators that a human being did not write this screenplay. Suddenly, the camera cuts from a neon-green field in what the press notes inform me is the Republic of Ireland to Times Square, which inexplicably transforms into the Meatpacking District.
2. It’s here we meet Lindsay Lohan’s Maddie, a polite, nervous book editor who sometimes puts on glasses to indicate she doesn’t know she’s beautiful and who exclusively wears one dress, apparently available in a variety of fabrics and prints, with a suspiciously high neckline and below-the-knee hemline that hints at the lurking specter of Traditional Family Values. (It should be said that Lohan sells this movie as well as anyone can, Dakota Johnson style, and I pray she wrenches herself free of both her binding Netflix contract and its attendant Handmaid’s Tale–ass stylist.) Maddie is late for a flashy, paparazzi-attended book premiere (??) that will feature a freakishly small step-and-repeat that directly faces the street, a cocktail hour during which everyone sits down in booths, and a somber, intimate reading.
3. The book in question is Two Irish Hearts, by caddish author Paul Kennedy, Maddie’s longtime client and crush. His “best-selling in the U.K.” books, it’s soon revealed, are mostly ghostwritten by Maddie, leaving her no time to write her own novels or to arrive at Meatpacking Square at the appropriate hour. ChatGPT has been instructed to inform us that, despite having really good hair, Maddie does not “have it together,” so it regurgitates a visual cue from the hundreds of rom-com scripts it has trawled for parts: Maddie’s scarf gets caught in her cab door, and she runs after it half-heartedly, then gives up.
4. On the red carpet at an event that she has planned and is late for, Maddie calmly answers a phone call from her mom, Jane Seymour, who very clearly shot all of her scenes in a single day, only ever appears via FaceTime, and seems to have no idea which movie she is in. Good for her. Seymour is audibly struggling to order $74 toilet paper on a website called School Supplies of America. The large bottle of keyboard cleaner that sits next to her, huffably, might explain this entire movie. Seymour lectures Maddie about being late to her event despite directly contributing to that problem and asks Maddie if she has told Paul she is in love with him. “I hope you haven’t told anyone about my feelings for him,” Maddie says, noting — as she goes on speakerphone and places the phone on the public restroom’s sink — that even her best friends do not know about her feelings. Her best friends are named Heather and Emma, again pointing to an AI maniacally commandeered by someone who grew up in the