Michael Fairbanks
Dylan Meyer’s The Wrong Girls opens with our titular roommates taking a gigantic bong rip and then conversing through coughs. This moment confirms Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat as a stoner duo ordained by the gods. In fact, it feels cruel that we are only now getting the first Wrong Girls flick in 2026. This franchise should’ve been underway shortly after The Runaways (2010) released. This tension is felt in Meyer’s film. Stewart and Shawkat’s personas are entirely new for the genre. A palpable friendship only made funnier by the fact that they’re high and clueless. Male stoner duos only express affection towards one another in a crass “no homo” kind of way. The care between these two is real. However, The Wrong Girls is also hellbent on fitting the mold of Pineapple Express or Harold and Kumar. It forces Stewart and Shawkat to stumble through a bog standard “on the run” story with a mild sci-fi twist. I was kind of hoping we’d spend a night in with them.
Molly (Shawkat) absolutely loves living in a permanent haze with Stanford dropout Frankie (Stewart) but is very seriously considering moving in with her financially stable and persnickety boyfriend Josh (Zack Fox). We never really understand what Molly does for her remote job, she allegedly sends spreadsheets and then gets paid. That check cannot come soon enough, as our girls are also two weeks late on rent. A case of mistaken identity complicates things. After Frankie confronts the scrub she was dating about hitting the nightclub with an identical scientist named Frances, a mercenary (LaKeith Stanfield) mixes up his Kristen Stewarts. He picks Frankie up and takes her to his apartment only to hand her a mysterious briefcase. As hungover Frankie tries to put the pieces together at home, she and Molly discover several chemical vials inside the case. Naturally, they shotgun a couple and try to sell the rest. Little do they know that the side effects from the serum do not stop at a bad trip. They start to clue in once they discover the armed group of European thugs chasing them but only barely.
The Wrong Girls is at its funniest before any superpowers or talking cats get involved. Dylan Meyer and cinematographer Todd Banhazl do such a great job blocking Frankie and Molly’s lazy lifestyle. We’re never just sitting on the couch trading improv lines with coverage. Frankie and Molly are always futzing around in these locations, sometimes manically, other times catatonically. It may seem like a minor note, but this finesse allows Stewart and Shawkat a total sense of play even in scenes that are just establishing exposition. We are being strung along by the type of friends who are always in some kind of high stakes situation while remaining just cavalier enough about it to be charming.
Stewart and Shawkat don’t settle for a trite “opposites attract” dynamic. These are friends who are in complete sync with each other even when butting heads. Nobody has to be the stick in the mud who spends the whole film complaining. Kristen Stewart finally gets to play someone who isn’t deeply tormented. She brings a little existential dread to Frankie, but no more than your average millennial. This performance far more closely resembles her deeply endearing real-life personality and leaning into that unlocks a whole new movie star persona for her. Meanwhile, Shawkat reins in the utter delirium of her brilliant Search Party performance for something far more approachable. Molly is a little goofy and doesn’t really know what she wants but she’s still a loyal friend and someone with genuine potential. She matches Stewart bar for bar and all of the film’s best moments come from watching them seem to discover the funniest way to say their lines in the moment. We might as well be hanging out with them on set.
It starts to go a little too cartoony in the second act. I’m all for embracing a sillier tone but this veers into Adult Swim territory that clashes with the energy that its leads are creating. The serum they take cannot just be a surreal sidebar that figures into their regular lives in unexpected ways. The whole movie has to be about how European gangsters need it back from German Kate McKinnon because of conspiracy sci-fi lore that we have to sit through. These scenes have an unwelcome SNL stink to them, Frankie and Molly seemed as bored as I was. The only thread with any potential to pull on is a strange attraction felt between Stanfield and Stewart that neither one of them wants to openly admit to. We get a couple of cute exchanges where the two toy with their characters’ contrasting approaches to life, but Stanfield is in the movie so little that by the time this element is introduced, the film is almost over. One has to wonder if this was supposed to be a bigger part of the film but Stewart and Stanfield just didn’t click. Aside from several amusing inner monologues from Seth Rogen and Kumail Nanjiani as cats Dio and GG, The Wrong Girls never capitalizes on its absurdity. It is an inconvenience to be overcome for more time in the room with Molly and Frankie.
If we do get a sequel to The Wrong Girls, I hope it takes some inspiration from the more grounded One of Them Days. Stewart and Shawkat’s on-screen chemistry feels like unfinished business and there’s no need to reset them. I just hope that along the way they can reinvent this niche of comedy because some of these tropes are starting to smell like ash from a roach. To get there, The Wrong Girls will have to find their audience, and I suspect that they might be a little too couch-locked to make it to the theater.
