What does it take to elevate a piece of genre boilerplate – or, in the case of tonight’s offering, a piece of teenie genre boilerplate – from an undemanding watch over a couple of glasses of wine to something that gets its very own review on The Agitation of the Mind?
Is it the way in which all the familiar tropes are laid out with the care and enjoyment of one who clearly loves the genre but hasn’t necessarily distinguished himself within it? (Step forward John R Leonetti of ‘Mortal Kombat: Annihilation’, ‘The Butterfly Effect 2’ and ‘Annabelle’ not-quite-fame.)
Is it the winning performance by a leading lady who gives her all and in doing so transcends a script chicaned with twists and turns that you can see coming like an aircraft carrier on a duckpond? (Step forward Joey King, who at the age of 19 has more acting credits to her name than most septuagenarians who have been in the business all their lives. Though, granted, most septuagenarians don’t have ‘Ramona and Beezus’ and ‘The Kissing Booth’ on their CVs.)
Or is it because it’s closing in on All Hallow’s Eve and your humble blogger needs to bash out the last few 13 For Halloween reviews pronto pronto?
A little bit of column A, a little of column B and a little bit of column C, as it turns out.
‘Wish Upon’ starts with a prepubescent Clare Shannon (Raegan Revord) go cycling off down a suburban street with a distinctly Haddenfield vibe, under the watchful eye of her mother Johanna (Elisabeth Rohm). Johanna’s just dumped a suspicious looking package in a bin and withdraws wearily into the house. By the time Clare reaches the end of the street and pedals back, Johanna has taken herself off to an upstairs room, thrown a rope over a ceiling beam and goodnight Vienna.
Fast forward a decade or so and Clare (King) is the unpopular white trash girl at the kind of high school that can’t make up its mind whether it wants to be in ‘Carrie’ or ‘Clueless’. Her best, indeed only, friends are June (Shannon Purser) and Meredith (Sydney Park) who are also outcasts (seemingly based on hair colour and skin colour respectively). Clare’s frustrated musician father Jonathan (Ryan Phillippe) makes a living foraging for scrap metal or resaleable items from peoples’ trash, kind of like a less phlegmy Albert Steptoe and HOLY FUCK, WHEN DID RYAN PHILLIPPE START PLAYING DAD ROLES? CHRIST ALMIGHTY, THAT MAKES ME FEEL OLD! Oh, and there's Sherilyn Fenn, the va-va-voom sex symbol of my adolescence, playing the kindly middle-aged neighbour, so just pass me my free fucking bus pass already.
I SAID Clare’s dad is a scrap merchant and one day he brings home a puzzle box for her that’s covered in Chinese ideograms. Long story short, the box grants her seven wishes. Small print: blood price required for wishes one to six, the owner’s soul in return for the seventh. And guess what, the blood prices are always paid by those closest to the owner.
So what we have is a melange of ‘Hellraiser’ (box that releases something unpleasant), ‘The Box’ (you get a good deal, someone else gets a truly shit one) and ‘Final Destination’ (in the way that ‘Wish Upon’ sets up its death scenes, most transparently in a roadside wheel change intercut with some business in an elevator), with a little bit of ‘The Babadook’ (the puzzle box, like the pop-up book, seems impervious to getting chucked away) and ‘The Unborn’ (curse born of wartime trauma) thrown in for good measure. You’ll probably identify a couple of dozen other points of genre reference when you watch it.
So why should you watch it? Well, it’s Leonetti’s best film to date, and while I realise that’s not exactly saying much, it does at least point to the possibility of better things from him in a way that everything else on his filmography most definitely doesn’t. And it’s got an attractive young cast who engage with the material and don’t condescend to it, or the audience, in terms of their performances. Also, it doesn’t break its own rules like, say, ‘It Follows’ did. And it doesn’t allow its characters to dodge the inevitable. As much as a lightweight flick like ‘Wish Upon’ can be said to be about anything it’s about the price that has to be paid, never mind how shallow the pleasures that were taken along the way and how ultimately transient they were.
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