Film Review - Wish You Were Here (2025)
January 15, 2025
Something must’ve happened on the set of 2022’s “Orphan: First Kill.” In that movie, stars Julia Stiles and Isabelle Fuhrman were tasked with battling each other as evil deeds were traded between their characters. And now, Stiles is directing “Wish You Were Here,” putting Fuhrman in the lead role of a romantic drama. Clearly the two get along, and their second collaboration is quite different than their first, as Stiles (who co-scripts) oversees an adaptation of a 2017 Renee Carlino novel, which tries to get soft and tragic while following the problems of a woman attempting to find love and a future for herself. “Wish You Were Here” isn’t classified as a YA book, but Stiles tends to treat the material as such, out to explore an overly simplistic relationship between two people who fail to secure much of a connection to begin with. It’s not challenging work, and it lacks essential warmth, as Stiles (making her feature-length helming debut) can’t figure out how to accurately measure Carlino’s melodrama. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com
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