The Wrong Girls has the essential ingredient many buddy comedies spend an entire screenplay trying to manufacture: Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat seem to share a private rhythm before the plot gives them anything interesting to do.
Spoiler-light review. It covers the setup and comic style without revealing the resolution.
Friendship before machinery
Frankie and Molly are broke Los Angeles roommates, late on rent and moving through gig work and intoxicated inertia. A mistaken-identity plot pulls them toward criminals, experimental drugs and increasingly elastic reality. The premise is designed to escalate, but Dylan Meyer's strongest decision is to let the central friendship arrive already formed. The pair interrupt, indulge and irritate one another with the ease of people whose worst habits have become shared furniture. That lived-in quality makes even thin jokes feel momentarily specific.
Stewart and Shawkat play different speeds
Stewart gives Frankie a guarded physical comedy: a person trying to remain unimpressed while panic keeps finding new routes into her body. Shawkat's Molly is more openly appetitive and improvisational, able to turn a digression into the center of a scene. Their contrast creates a comic circuit. The movie is at its best when it trusts reaction, silence and mutual recognition. Supporting performers add eccentric pressure, but the leads remain more persuasive than the conspiracy assembled around them.
A stoner comedy afraid of empty space
Meyer stuffs the film with dialogue, visual detours, science-fiction complications and bits that keep extending past their natural endpoint. Talking cats and psychic possibilities fit the altered-state logic, yet the screenplay too often announces its weirdness rather than allowing it to bloom from an ordinary task gone wrong. Classic stoner comedy depends on friction between slowed perception and urgent circumstance. Here, both the characters and the movie frequently sprint, leaving too little negative space for absurdity to become genuinely disorienting.
The mess has a point
The chaos is not entirely undisciplined. Frankie and Molly belong to an economy that demands constant motion while offering no meaningful progress; their intoxication becomes both retreat and alternate form of attention. The mistaken identities and duplicate selves push at a useful question: what counts as failure when adulthood itself looks like a rigged assignment? The film's pacifist, anti-system streak gives the silliness a political undertow without turning every gag into a message.
Why the comedy divides
A generous viewer can enjoy the cast's evident pleasure and the film's loyalty to its own ridiculousness. A less receptive viewer will notice how often a setup arrives pre-labelled as quirky and how rarely secondary characters gain dimension. The visual energy and soundtrack keep the picture moving, but momentum is not the same as accumulation. By the end, the friendship has developed less than the mythology around it, which weakens the emotional payoff.
Who should see it
The Wrong Girls is for viewers who want a female-led stoner comedy, enjoy Kristen Stewart in a loose comic register and can accept a deliberately juvenile blend of crime and science fiction. Those seeking the relaxed hangout tempo of the genre's classics may find it exhausting. NEON released the 99-minute, R-rated film in US theaters on August 14, 2026; territory-specific legal availability should be checked locally.
Review at a glance
| Element | Assessment |
|---|---|
| Lead chemistry | Immediate, specific and stronger than the plot |
| Comic rhythm | Energetic but crowded; too few pauses |
| Ideas | Gig-economy drift beneath psychedelic nonsense |
| Reservation | Supporting mythology overwhelms character growth |
Verdict
The Wrong Girls is not the effortless cult object it wants to be, but Stewart and Shawkat keep its overgrown comic experiment personable. The movie's best special effect is not telepathy or a talking animal; it is the believable shorthand of a friendship that survives a badly organized universe.
