Joey King (Steve Wilkie/Broad Green Pictures)
Wish Upon, as one might correctly guess from its title and ad campaign, is another in a long line of horror films based around the maxim “be careful what you wish for.” In the unlikely event that that isn’t already very clear to you, the song that runs under the closing credits—the very first thing you hear after the film’s stunning and unintentionally hilarious conclusion—features those very words.
From the director of the widely panned Annabelle, this is not a subtle or particularly original horror movie, but it is never, ever boring. In fact, it may be the most striking subversion of a well-worn trope in ages, despite also being almost admirably stupid.
The premise is a variation on the “monkey’s paw” horror tale in which a protagonist is gifted some arcane trinket that grants wishes. Unbeknownst to the beholder, this strange little MacGuffin has given them the powers to make their wildest dreams come true—for a price. There’s a finite number of wishes, each to be paid for with their own blood sacrifice. But the owner doesn’t realize their fortunes come at such a heavy cost until it’s nearly too late and they must try to undo the ill they’ve done or at least rid themselves of the cursed object.
In Wish Upon, a slightly more realistic permutation results in a film that feels both more honest and more disturbing. Clare (Joey King), is a sullen, unpopular brunette struggling with childhood trauma (her mother committed suicide) and teenage angst (her father is Ryan Phillipe). She has a pair of great friends who speak in hand me down Diablo Cody one-liners, but is otherwise cartoonishly unpopular. We’re meant to sympathize with her. One day, she’s given a Chinese music box that looks suspiciously like something her mother threw in the trash before hanging herself.
For a moment, we do have feelings for her predicament. Until her first wish is granted.
Josephine King (John Medland/Broad Green Pictures)
Typically, the first wish in a story like this is harmless and easily chalked up to coincidence.
But Clare wishes her enemy “would just rot or something” and then the next morning the girl’s goddamn toes start falling off right before her dog dies. The film immediately stacks the deck in favor of the music box’s powers being legit, but the heroine is so self-centered and myopic she doesn’t even begin to notice a correlation until her fifth wish, at which point multiple, likable characters have died and she’s become rich, popular and loved but still fundamentally unhappy.
The film’s structure is all over the place, as it doesn’t play well with the simple back and forth of wish and consequence. Clare will make a vapid wish, say, for her father to be less embarrassing, and then we’ll cut to one of the supporting cast members doing a mundane task by themselves, where we watch with bated breath for a Final Destination level Rube Goldberg device of death to befall them. The kills are awfully, ridiculously constructed, and they become truly depressing when coupled with the short-sighted wishes that cause them. Seriously, a woman dies just so Ryan Phillipe can 1) shave, 2) rediscover his passion for playing the saxophone and 3) be called fuckable by one of Clare’s friends.
For much of the second act, Wish Upon is just the dumbest horror film. The jump scares don’t frighten. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation director John R. Leonetti imbues the proceedings with a foreboding that is undercut at every turn by Clare’s obnoxiousness. Once she finally makes the connection between her wishes and the carnage around her, the film picks up, because every remaining supporting character (chief among them Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt alum Ki Hong Lee) calls her out for her apocalyptic selfishness and she basically turns into an irritating, teenage version of Gollum from Lord of The Rings. The music box becomes a haphazard metaphor for substance abuse as self-medication for unprocessed trauma, an at-the-ready trope that no one behind the film is fully capable of executing on.
But the movie functions well as an absurdist critique of materialism and the inability to accept and appreciate the good in the world. There’s something charming about a film written by a black woman (Viral scribe Barbara Marshall), a rare entity in the horror industry, that so effectively skewers the inherent solipsism at the heart of every white girl teen flick, scary movie or not. The script is clumsily upholstered, and every turn elicits its fair share of uncomfortable laughs, but even in failure, Wish Upon is consistently entertaining.
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Directed by John R. Leonetti
Written by Barbara Marshall
Starring Joey King, Ki Hong Lee, Sydney Park, Elisabeth Rohm, and Ryan Phillipe
Rated PG-13 for Sex and Nudity, Violence and Gore, Profanity, Alcohol/Drugs/Smoking, and Frightening/Intense Scenes.
90 Minutes
Opens today at a theater near you.
