The first smart thing The Wrong Girls does is cast Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat as best friends who have clearly spent too much time together.
Frankie and Molly do not need to explain their rhythm. They cough after the same hit, finish each other’s thoughts, irritate each other without creating any real danger of separation, and move through their apartment with the intimacy of people who stopped worrying about being impressive years ago. Their chemistry is not the movie’s decoration. It is the entire reason Dylan Meyer’s feature debut works as often as it does.
That matters because almost everything surrounding them is deliberately ridiculous.
Frankie and Molly are broke Los Angeles roommates whose ambitions rarely survive contact with weed. A mysterious briefcase and an experimental drug eventually give them abilities they are wildly unqualified to possess, including a psychic connection that makes their already codependent friendship even harder to escape. The plot gets bigger from there, bringing in criminals, scientists, talking cats and enough side characters to make the movie feel as if it keeps opening doors it has no intention of closing.
Some of those doors are very funny.
Others lead nowhere.
Meyer understands the stoner comedy as a genre built on delayed reactions. The joke is rarely that Frankie and Molly are high. It is that everyone else has reached the obvious conclusion several seconds before they have. Stewart is especially good at playing the space between confusion and commitment, the moment when Frankie has no idea what is happening but decides to go with it anyway.
Shawkat is the steadier presence, which in this movie only means she is marginally more capable of completing a task. Molly’s attempts at practical thinking give Stewart something to crash against, and their best scenes have the loose, overlapping quality of real friendship rather than the setup-punchline rhythm of a conventional studio comedy.
The movie’s broader comic instincts are less reliable.
Kate McKinnon appears in exactly the sort of role you would expect Kate McKinnon to play in a movie involving an experimental mind-altering drug, and she is funny because her commitment is absolute. LaKeith Stanfield, Tony Hale, Zack Fox, Seth Rogen and Kumail Nanjiani all contribute to a cast that feels almost comically overqualified for the material. Rogen and Nanjiani voicing the women’s cats is a joke that should wear out immediately. Somehow it lasts longer than expected.
Still, The Wrong Girls has a habit of mistaking escalation for momentum. Every time Frankie and Molly’s friendship starts to become interesting, another bit arrives. Then another character. Then another detour. The movie is only 100 minutes, but it sometimes feels overpacked rather than fast.
Todd Banhazl’s cinematography helps. The movie is brighter, stranger and more composed than its deliberately stupid premise requires. Meyer does not shoot the film like disposable streaming comedy. Colors smear across interiors, ordinary apartments become hazy little worlds, and even the film’s more juvenile visual jokes have an intentionality behind them.
Heidi Bivens’ costumes are part of that personality too. A long section involving improvised trash-bag outfits should be too pleased with itself, but Stewart and Shawkat wear the gag with enough conviction that the stupidity becomes the point.
That is the movie in miniature.
The Wrong Girls is proud of being dumb, and that pride is occasionally freeing. There is something refreshing about watching two women lead the kind of broad, chemically altered buddy comedy Hollywood once reserved almost entirely for men. Meyer is not trying to elevate the stoner movie into prestige filmmaking. She is trying to let women be lazy, messy, vulgar, devoted and spectacularly bad at decision-making without turning any of those traits into a lesson.
That looseness gives the movie warmth.
It also gives it an excuse for too many jokes that never really land.
The current critical split makes sense. There is enough personality here to inspire declarations that the stoner comedy is back, and enough dead air to understand anyone wondering whether it should have stayed asleep. The movie is funniest when it trusts Stewart and Shawkat and weakest when it tries to prove how outrageous its premise can become.
By the end, the plot has tied itself into enough knots that the details barely matter. Frankie and Molly matter. Their shared frequency matters. The sense that these two women would still be sitting on the same floor, smoking and talking nonsense after every criminal, scientist and psychic complication disappeared matters.
The Wrong Girls is not a new stoner classic. It is too inconsistent for that.
But it is specific enough, affectionate enough and weird enough that you can imagine people finding it late at night years from now and deciding it was made specifically for them.
