Avis Metacritic

This movie is a one-of-a-kind experience – blarney carried to rhapsodic heights.

Ondine suggests that coincidence and magic are often the same thing.

Ondine is Injected with a heavy dose of magic and has a lot going for it: an endearing performance from star Colin Farrell, Christopher Doyle's evocative cinematography and a captivating-if thin-story.

Ondine plumbs the country's most resonant fairy tale and plays impishly along the borders of postcard fantasies of Ireland.

Mostly, though, Ondine deftly demonstrates just how far we'll reach for any promise of relief from life's hardships, in whatever form -- magic or plain dumb luck -- it arrives.

Pretty magical.

The road is rocky when the story speeds up to take care of business, with the end a mad dash to tie up loose ends. Still, there is enough saving grace on these craggy shores to let the mists and the legends roll in and envelop you for a while.

Funny, whimsical and as warming as a big bowl of Irish stew.

Neil Jordan's Ondine has a split personality. It starts promisingly as a fantasy but ends disappointingly as a thriller.

Jordan's screenplay aims for a romanticism that the beautiful but stiff Bachleda is unable to fulfill. And the ending, which injects the film's dreamy sensibility with an ugly note of realism, crashes over everything like a frigid wave.