If you know me, you know the one genre that I continuously struggle with are romantic comedies. Despite how cliché the genre is, I despise how much of the genre romanticizes toxic relationships. To get my attention with this genre, you really have to pull off something unique and interesting. But an act of God or by the karmic energy of a bickering couple, Wishful Thinking is an absolute delight.
Julia (Maya Hawke, Stranger Things) and Charlie (Lewis Pullman, Thunderbolts*) are a volatile couple in Portland, Oregon, who are at a loss of how to fix their broken relationship. Julia is an ambitious game designer and Charlie is a struggling musician. Both are in their dream jobs but they feel unfilled in their lives. Eventually, the couple is pressured into attending a couple-therapy seminar run by twin healers who claim that relationships can be fixed through cosmic energy. However, the session triggers a karmic universal system that makes the state of their relationship affect the world around them. With earthquakes, the stock market, and entire nations at risk, Charlie and Julia must confront whether their love can survive amidst so much destruction.
The film opens with a montage of the couple screaming and fighting each other over Charlie wanting to do an impromptu trip to Italy and Julia refusing due to work. They yell at each other, smash things on the ground, slam doors, and say terrible things about one another. It becomes immediately apparent through the film’s split frames and slightly offcolored, misaligned shots that Julia and Charlie may not be a compatible couple. However, due to fear or cowardice they stay with each other because they do have fiery chemistry when they are both in sync. So when they go to these twin healing gurus and confess their troubles and problems to each other, something shifts between them and within the fabric of this film.
Once the couple realizes that their affection for each other doesn’t just affect themselves, but the entire world around them, they are thrown into a rollercoaster filled with highs and horrors as they navigate this new element of their relationship. When the couple is at a high, they’re life is truly great. Outside of the great sex and fiery chemistry between them, their stock is going through the roof, Charlie’s latest single is high in the streaming charts, and Julia’s video game is getting more funding. But the moment they hit a bump in their relationship, everything crashes into a sea of horror, and it’s not just their stocks, Charlie’s single, and Julia’s video game. When they are at each other’s throats it causes countries to collapse and earthquakes to occur across the planet. With these unintended consequences, the couple is forced to look at their relationship and ask if they are truly right for each other. What follows is one of the smartest romcoms I have seen in a while.
What makes Wishful Thinking stand out amongst the crowd of romcoms is that this film is not caught up in a sweeping romance of its premise. It instead puts its focus on dissecting a relationship between two people who are not compatible for one another and the consequences of them staying together. Dissecting their wants and their needs and how both of them have different goals in their life and that is causing them conflict. Neither party wants to compromise and their unwillingness to do so is not only destroying themselves, but their relationships with everyone around them. While it is clear that they both care deeply for one another, their relationship has turned toxic, and they need to realize it before they inevitably destroy the world.
Anchored by Maya Hawke and Lewis Pullman, Wishful Thinking finds its pulse in the pair’s volatile, electric chemistry. They make the chaos feel lived-in. One minute inseparable, the next on the verge of implosion and that push-pull is what keeps the film from slipping into easy sentiment. Even when it brushes up against familiar romcom beats, it pivots just enough to undercut them, choosing discomfort over catharsis. It’s messy, sometimes abrasive, and refreshingly uninterested in sanding down its rough edges with romantic sentiment. If anything, that willingness to get ugly is precisely the point. Wishful Thinking isn’t here to reassure you about love, it’s here to challenge what we’re willing to call it.
My Rating: B+
Wishful Thinking is currently seeking US Distribution.
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