Wish Upon review: this millennial Monkey's Paw plays like Final Destination minus the wit
Dir: John R. Leonetti; Starring: Joey King, Ryan Phillippe, Ki Hong Lee, Sydney Park, Elisabeth Röhm, Sherilyn Fenn. 15 cert, 90 mins.
The Monkey’s Paw – a wizened simian appendage that grants wishes at a terrible price – was dreamt up more than 100 years ago in a short story by W. W. Jacobs. But it’s one of those durable horror concepts that pop culture hasn’t been able to shake off since. You might recall it popping up in a classic Treehouse of Horror episode of The Simpsons: Lisa plumps for world peace and the newly docile planet is promptly enslaved by aliens.
Wish Upon tries to put a millennial spin on the premise, but fumbles everything it sets out to do so extravagantly, the film itself feels like the result of some kind of diabolical, chimpanzee-fingered pact. In place of the classic paw is a haunted music box covered in ancient Chinese sigils – in this film, aside from the fig-leaf presence of Clare’s amiable Asian classmate Ryan (Ki Hong Lee), ‘Chinese’ is basically a synonym for ‘sinister’ – which is discovered by scrap collector Jonathan Shannon (Ryan Phillippe) while raking through the dustbins outside a be-gargoyled mansion.
It’s an ideal present, obviously, for his teenage daughter Clare (Joey King), who's scarred by her mother’s suicide and relentlessly bullied at school. One night, she idly whisper over the box that she wishes Darcie (Josephine Langford), one of her mean-girl tormentors, would “just, like, go rot.”
As she sleeps the box clicks open, a sinister melody wafts from between its gears, and in the morning, hey presto: necrotising fasciitis for Darcie. The cost is paid by Clare’s faithful golden retriever Max, whose lifeless form she later discovers crumpled up beneath the porch, being gnawed by rats.
Could the music box, the out-of-the-blue flesh-eating infection and Max’s grisly fate somehow be connected? It takes Clare a ludicrously long time to put two and two together, by which point the film has long settled into a plodding cycle of granted wishes and lethal accidents, which play out like the Final Destination series’ Heath-Robinson-esque calamities minus any trace of inventiveness or gallows wit. (One pits Sherilyn Fenn against a malfunctioning waste disposal unit.)
Director John R. Leonetti (Annabelle) and screenwriter Barbara Marshall don’t establish with any consistency how the box actually operates – does it change the entire world around Clare, or just tweak details other characters might notice? – while the results of the wishes are often completely baffling.
Clare’s plea for her scavenging dad to be less embarrassing results in him rediscovering his passion for the saxophone, then moodily honking out power ballads in the living room when her friends come round to visit.
Connoisseurs of the accidentally ludicrous will find much to laugh at here – see also some dismal stuff about multiverses and a Tati-like pratfall in which Clare, dodging traffic, cycles into a line of wheelie bins. But scares and intrigue are both in miserably short supply.
