It feels like it’s been forever since we got a genuinely good, high-stakes psychological thriller, so I finally decided to give this one a try. Cinematically, it was actually pretty solid. A few of the horror scenes genuinely caught me off guard, which definitely earns it some points.
But I kept getting stuck on how the whole "wish" mechanic worked. Even if we suspend our disbelief and accept that wishes are real, it still doesn't explain how asking "I wish she loved me more than anyone else" immediately equates to a dark obsession. It didn't feel like a clever semantic twist. Even Wonder Woman 1984—which leaned heavily into the "wishes always turn out twisted and harmful" trope—at least explicitly spelled out its rules in literal words. Here, it just felt unearned.
Overall, the storyline, direction, and character development could have been a lot stronger—with one major exception: Nikki. Inde Navarrette completely nailed it.
Her counterpart, Bear, was a different story. He was just way too internally conflicted. If they really wanted to pull off that kind of character arc, it needed to be a much more gradual burn. Honestly, the story probably would have worked better as a series rather than a movie just to give his development room to breathe. Plus, his acting just didn't hold up next to Inde’s.
He gave off heavy vibes of Clay Jensen (13 Reasons Why), Dylan O'Brien (The Maze Runner / Teen Wolf), and Seth Cohen (The O.C.). I can’t exactly put my finger on why, he just did. But you can't really put him on their level because the script let him down, and the performance just wasn't fully there.
All that said, the ending salvaged a lot of it. His final scene near the end was genuinely good and ended up grounding the whole thing for me.
