WISH UPON: Seven Wishes, Zero Winners

If, like poor Clare Shannon (Joey King), I was granted seven wishes from a magical box, the first thing on my list after seeing Wish Upon would be a refund.

I’ve written frequently about horror’s resurgence of late, with films like The Babadook and It Follows and The Witch representing new, more stylistically accomplished versions of the genre. Even outside of the new found artistic approach to horror we’ve had the likes of The Conjuring, Lights Out and Oculus that find the genre on good form even when it isn’t trying anything new. What I’m getting at here is that we can no longer dismiss a horror film now as “just another horror movie” – there’s far too much good stuff around at present for the genre itself to be at blame.

And that’s a great thing, and horror is a great genre – who doesn’t love a good jolt to keep our senses alive, right? The downside of horror’s reemergence as a noteworthy genre of cinema is that it removes an excuse for poor film making, something director John Leonetti might’ve desperately wanted to rely on when he first watched the complete cut of Wish Upon. Much like most lacklustre movies, there are flashes of potential across the film: a gripping set piece here, a nifty cinematography trick there.

Ultimately, Wish Upon feels derivative from its first frame right the way through to its last, never so much as offering up a decent jump scare, let alone any sustained pieces of tension or nightmarish explorations of character. Y’know, what the genre should be used for.

Cliches At The Ready, Folks

It all focuses on Clare Shannon. Her mum commits suicide when she’s a young girl, leaving her to grow up with her father (Ryan Phillipe), a scavenger who roots through dumpsters looking for something to sell on. One day, he brings Shannon home a mysterious music box. Intrigued, Shannon plays around with it, and soon finds everything she wishes comes true.

She wants a nasty bully to get her comeuppance? She falls gravely sick. She wants the hot guy at school to be in love with her? He’s holding her hand the very next day. But what Shannon fails to realise, however, is that her wishes have consequences, and pretty violent ones too.

In almost every negative review for a sloppy horror movie, you’ll find the critic writing about how horror only works when the characters are likeable – and, for the most part, it’s a valid argument. Never before has it been as relevant as it is with Wish Upon, though. Oh boy does Wish Upon struggle in making its characters likeable. Writer Barbara Marshall demonstrates little understanding of teenage life, throwing cliches at her protagonist like it’s the end of the world. Needlessly cliched characters are the worst, but what’s worse than the worst? Needlessly cliched teenagers.

How To Squander Potential: A Guide By Wish Upon

Even though played by the reliably good Joey King, Clare remains a deeply, fundamentally unlikable person. Her wishes are bratty but innocent enough to begin with, but she soon begins to understand the danger of what she’s doing, yet she continues. Wish Upon‘s protagonist intentionally allows innocent people to die so she can get what she wants, and then the film expects us to feel sympathy for her. There’s probably something very interesting lurking about in there, an adult take on the issues of entitlement that can sometimes plague younger generations, but the film has no intention of exploring it. Wish Upon has the thematic depth of a doorstop.

What makes things worse is that Marshall takes the film in a potentially very interesting direction in its middle act. After a series of “I just wanna be popular” throwaway wishes, the film eventually lands on something with the weight to massively shake everything up. When the words left Clare’s mouth, I felt a surge of energy rush through me – could things finally be about to get interesting? Like one of its innocent victims, though, the potential is caught by the hair and dragged through a blender. I’ve never known a horror film squander something so interesting so quickly.

More Than Words

The issues don’t just surface in the film’s script and ideas, though. Wish Upon makes some smart stylistic touches, but the direction is all round lazy. Remember the levels of tension in Final Destination 5, when that gymnast went through five minutes of near death on a balance beam only to be undone by some powder and a fan? You won’t find anything like that here. The prolonged death scenes are treated like a chore, as if Leonetti can’t wait to move on and get away from trying to craft tension – the appropriate shots are all there, there’s just no spark.

This is especially disappointing when you join the dots and realise this is the man behind the cinematography of The Conjuring, the director behind the lesser but still suitably unsettling Annabelle. It’s a serious step backwards, but it’s tough to really blame him. Wish Upon is a mess from initial premise, let alone its direction and editing – not even Hitchc*ck himself could’ve saved this one. The film has potential, it has a toddler’s handful of decent ideas and King is clearly a young actress of good talent – it just has no clue what to do with anything in its hand.

Is Wish Upon a lesser horror film, or did you have fun with its goofiness? Let us know in the comments!

Wish Upon is out now in the US, and will be released in the UK on July 28th. All international release dates are here.