Even the best and most iconic stoner comedies cheat out to privilege sober onlookers. The humor always finds at least some way to take advantage of the tokers and use them as the butt of a joke. The incongruity of their highness reliably foils for at least one great gag at their expense. But not so in Dylan Meyer’s “The Wrong Girls,” where even the closest equivalent of this moment also uses the opportunity to poke fun at Tony Hale’s smug, square rich guy.
Meyer gets audiences as close to the experience of a marijuana-fueled haze without actually rolling a joint for them. It stops short of mimicking the hallucinatory, mind-altering elements in part because its two hapless codependent roommates, Kristen Stewart’s Frankie and Alia Shawkat’s Alice, exist in a pretty consistent daze where this is just room tone. As the kids might say, “The Wrong Girls” is all vibes.
On Frankie and Alice’s distinct wavelength, anything is possible – but nothing is urgent. The logic of how they go about their days makes sense only to themselves, and Meyer finds great amusement in letting viewers drop in on an existence that has somehow managed to accommodate that way of being. It’s like getting hooked up to an IV drip of vintage Weird Twitter, where televisions being mounted on the ceiling and knives being able to self-chop through sheer brain power simultaneously makes no sense and complete sense.
But if there’s anything that Meyer nails in the film, it’s bringing the audience into Frankie and Alice’s shared vocabulary. The most ingenious device in “The Wrong Girls” is literalizing the connection between the duo – with the help of an experimental drug that they ingest – as a form of ESP where they can communicate without talking. It mystifies everyone around them that two women so otherwise out of it can be perfectly in sync. The spectators, on the other hand, get to be fully aligned with the protagonists and their unique neural pathways.
But when faced with thinking about something beyond their next bong hit or rent check (as someone memorably rails, “How much rent is enough? When does it stop?”), the inability to navigate corridors outside their own mind does come with some distinct disadvantages. As the title implies, the story of “The Wrong Girls” does veer into something of a crime caper. A Hitchcockian tale of mistaken identity ensues as those who want to leverage the drug for other purposes pursue Frankie and Alice, with Ty Segall’s throbbing score adding all the danger that the girls themselves don’t seem to feel.
Then again, it’s hard to sense much of a threat when the film’s MacGuffin, a briefcase full of drugs, literally needs the code “069” to open it. Even in its most action-packed shootouts, “The Wrong Girls” never loses its footing in dopey, winking fun because Meyer has little interest in building the traditional ramp-up to a big action climax. (The one she does have concludes with a celebratory dance to Céline Dion.) Whatever intrigue motivates the characters hunting for Frankie and Alice proves immaterial to enjoying the film itself, which functions more like a loose collection of plot points stringing along a madcap adventure.
In other words, it’s very much a first feature from Dylan Meyer. Under the guise of first-time naivete and the permissiveness of the genre, she throws everything at the wall. Why not have sassy talking cats voiced by Seth Rogen and Kumail Nanjiani offering Statler-and-Waldorf-style droll commentary throughout the stoner odyssey? Why not turn the made-up word “Hollish” (instead of Dutch) into a recurring bit? Why not wheel in Geena Davis for a late-film cameo, played entirely poker-faced? “The Wrong Girls” is nothing if not a series of tangential “yes, and” builds toward blazed-out bliss bolstered by a pair of devotedly doltish lead performances.
Shame, however, that this stoner comedy is not funnier. The biggest disadvantage of the film’s self-satisfied, insular humor is that it never feels as hilarious for the audience as it does for the participants. There’s no killer centerpiece sequence meant to be that memorable scene people leave the film talking about. “The Wrong Girls” is a little too content with a pleasant buzz when it should be reaching for a high. [B-]
“The Wrong Girls” opens in theaters beginning Friday, August 14.
Marshall Shaffer is a freelance film critic and journalist based in New York. In addition to The Playlist, his byline can be found at sites including Slant Magazine, Decider, Crooked Marquee, and Men's Health. He is a member of the Critics Choice Association and New York Film Critics Online.
