This spring, IndieWire declared the stoner movie practically dead. Little did we know, filmmaker Dylan Meyer was already holding the antidote.
Opening with the camera swallowed by the waves of the Pacific Ocean, “The Wrong Girls” immediately establishes itself as a film that needs to be tactile. Soon, we’re beneath the surface, watching a bioluminescent squid spray its ink as the title blossoms across the screen — the words themselves suggesting an intrinsic understanding of stoner culture. Very Deadhead. Very good start.
From there, we’re transported to Casa de Chill Zone, the Los Angeles home shared by best friends Frankie (Kristen Stewart) and Molly (Alia Shawkat). Starry-eyed, sharp-tongued, and mostly warmhearted, the roomies are watching a nature documentary, discussing how they supposedly “solved climate change” the previous night, and lamenting their desperate need for rent money.
Recognizable? Absolutely. But “The Wrong Girls” doesn’t fully lock in until Frankie gets her ass to work.
Leaving Molly at home to experiment with blue cheese and THC as brownie ingredients, the Kwik Thingz delivery girl heads out in uniform. She startles herself by activating a talking lawn ornament (again, relatable!), then arrives with a “cheese sculpture” at the home of some rich yuppie (Tony Hale). He’s mostly ignoring her, but breaks his train of thought long enough to ask one magnificent question.
“Are you literally smoking a lit joint right now?”
“My bad,” Frankie says, flicking the evidence out of her mouth and onto his driveway.
It’s the beginning of a movie that reinvigorates the stoner comedy in countless ways. So clever you want to grab Meyer by the shoulders and stare deep into her eyes until she really gets the compliment, “The Wrong Girls” bottles a new era for 420-friendly filmmaking by locating the sweet spot where being a pothead is still somewhat taboo — even in California.
Legalization has flattened the narrative stakes that used to make weed movies work. Getting high no longer automatically puts a character at odds with the cops, their parents, or another authority figure, so marijuana has lost some of the low-level transgression that sustained classics from “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” to “Pineapple Express.”
But Frankie isn’t funny because she’s afraid of being arrested. She’s funny because being brazenly checked-out from modern society, even while functioning within it, still feels socially incorrect. “The Wrong Girls” understands that weed is mainstream in 2026, but being visibly and unapologetically high is still seen by plenty of people as a kind of offense.
Is living your life from behind a curtain of smoke, particularly in a modern world this dire, really a bad thing?
Testing that theory, Molly and Frankie start the film at a crossroads. Ask Molly’s boyfriend Josh (Zack Fox) and he’ll tell you the girls’ shared comfort may be holding one or both women back. Frankie dropped out of an engineering program at Stanford years before, and Molly could be a professional baker if her talents weren’t always diverted toward party antics. Their friendship is an obvious life raft. But from the outside, it can also resemble an anchor.
Frankie confronts that insecurity when she goes alone to see an ex-boyfriend at a concert and finds him with a successful scientist who, minus the Lisa Loeb glasses, looks eerily like her. Following an altercation, Frankie is left half-drunk and wearing her rival’s broken frames when a mysterious man we’ll come to know as Not Metal Head Dave (a pitch-perfect LaKeith Stanfield) makes a terrible mistake. Yep, that’s how Frankie winds up with a briefcase containing “the most important scientific breakthrough of our time.”
The glowing substance inside, we eventually learn, was derived from the wordless coexistence of deep-sea creatures and designed to address humanity’s urgent need for empathy. But stuck in a money jam, Frankie and Molly immediately decide to sell it like any other recreational drug. Of course, not before taking two vials themselves — y’know, just to make sure they’re safe.
The psychedelic sequence that follows, punctuated by three European henchmen tailing the girls in a black SUV, is funny enough. But it’s not until the next morning, when Frankie and Molly feel the brain they already tend to share working on an actual telepathic level, that “The Wrong Girls” kicks into high gear.
Zoning out while the world feels like it’s on fire can be a kind of superpower, and Meyer uses supernatural abilities amplified by THC to explore how the stoner lifestyle can both mess up your day and save you from yourself. Think “Superbad” meets “Smiley Face,” with a nautical “Spider-Man” twist.
Stewart, having the absolute time of her life, allows the cool persona she’s cultivated across the modern indie scene to give way to an insecure brattiness that’s wonderfully refreshing. Adding syllables to words she’s annoyed to say (you’d be shocked how much disdain she can fit inside the name “Josh”), Stewart makes Frankie sound fundamentally different from any character she has played before — save for maybe a few bits on “SNL.” She’s highly capable but beaten down by a world that has made her feel like she isn’t enough, and just smart enough to almost think her way out of that trap.
But Frankie needs Molly and the sunny homemaker energy she brings to everyday life. Recalling her turn as a Texas waitress and another great best friend in Drew Barrymore’s “Whip It,” Shawkat plays Molly like your sweetest childhood friend crossed with a Keebler Elf. When Frankie gets down on herself, Molly rattles off obstacles they’ve escaped together. Whether inventing the Bong-a-Tron or freeing themselves after hours trapped inside a Party City parking lot, these misadventures almost always hinge on weed.
That isn’t a reflection of two friends struggling to spend time together sober. Marijuana is part of the private language keeping them afloat, and instead of feeling ashamed, they’ve designed their lives around celebrating it. There are moments when you want Molly and Frankie to kiss, but it feels more authentic that they don’t. Women have been the sexual punchline in stoner movies for too long. “The Wrong Girls” gives them access to the messy joy the genre has historically reserved for men without insisting their friendship become a romance before it can count as the film’s central love story.
The fantasy and sci-fi elements prove trickier for Meyer to navigate. As the increasingly zany plot heightens the stakes, her script — chock-full of hysterical lines like “What is today? March?” — repeatedly steers the girls’ attention inward. The pacing feels off throughout much of the film, with comic and contemplative asides gumming up the central caper.
Still, that shagginess is mostly redeemed by how tactile “The Wrong Girls” remains. Birds chirp as Frankie zones out while talking to the landlord. Later, she and Molly return to Hale’s rich guy hoping to sell the drugs while wearing matching cocktail dresses made from garbage bags. (Their house has been burgled, by the way.) An extended bit involving his maddeningly sleek front door, which just won’t close, does nothing for the plot and everything for the vibe.
These distractions make the movie resemble its heroines. They interrupt the action but deepen our connection to Frankie and Molly, allowing “The Wrong Girls” to exhibit the same introspection it locates in their lifestyle. Meyer makes space to laugh, look around, and fixate on the wrong object. The result will pleasantly scratch the brain this movie was made to reach.
If the drug at the heart of “The Wrong Girls” isn’t real, almost everything else about this extremely Los Angeles production is. The movie captures the very deep relationship so many stoner Angelenos have with their living rooms. Casa de Chill Zone is a handmade sanctuary against rent, corporate power, disappointment, and the 118.
Frankie’s suggestion that they “hole up in the Chill Zone until this Kock problem blows over” feels less like a punchline than a reasonable response to modern life. (Kock is the corporation chasing them for the drugs.) The supportive environment these friends have built has allowed them to retreat further inside their house. One of their biggest devastations doesn’t come from realizing they’re being followed, but learning that the cheap buffet they’ve visited for a decade may close.
Even Dio and GG, the girls’ cats (voiced by Seth Rogen and Kumail Nanjiani), have distinct strains of snooty homebody energy. Able to communicate with the animals as well as each other — and using Stanfield as their endlessly funny straight man — Stewart and Shawkat embody the real world creeping in on the safety of an L.A. home without making that collision dire. Kate McKinnon is similarly delightful as Dr. Chapman, a beleaguered genius who becomes the girls’ ally despite repeatedly insisting they should be dead. Geena Davis appears in a part so small you could see the movie and forget she was there.
The details are impeccable, from the EDGLRD T-shirt spotted on the rich guy’s son to the “818” tattoo flying across Frankie’s knuckles when she beats him at “Street Fighter.” Slasher synths lend the psychedelia a “Goosebumps” energy that makes nearly all of Los Angeles feel like Halloween night. Through kaleidoscopic lighting and inventive camerawork, Meyer roots her world in the kind of DIY mysticism you might associate with, say, a pizza tattoo.
Pay attention to the cardboard cutout of Celine Dion in the kitchen, too. She’s more important than you’d think. Those recognizable totems keep “The Wrong Girls” wondrous and nonthreatening even as its plot becomes increasingly action-packed. Violence gives way to dance (yes, literal dance) in a feel-good movie that doesn’t ignore the not-so-feel-good conditions making Frankie and Molly relatable. “How much rent is enough rent?” is only one of several surprisingly insightful questions they ask, and Meyer even takes a position on gun control without preaching.
Most importantly, “The Wrong Girls” rejects Josh’s assumption that growing up requires dismantling the life Frankie and Molly have built. Their lifestyle can grow. The mentality they share — and the friendship sustaining it — is a beautiful and powerful thing. In a world inundated with rage bait and political turmoil, that’s a mighty valuable export.
At one point, Frankie can’t open the drug briefcase and collapses onto the floor like a marionette, announcing, “Too hard! I quit!” Just days before her film opens nationwide, Meyer’s Instagram bio reads: “It’s good to give up.” That’s an incredibly compelling thought today, and perhaps a way forward for anyone struggling to cope. Sometimes giving up isn’t surrender. Sometimes it means refusing the exhausting terms you’ve been handed and returning to the people, places, and pleasures that make another future possible.
With her effervescent directorial debut, Meyer announces herself as a cinematic Caterpillar for the Alice in Wonderlands of our time. The great American stoner comedy isn’t dead. It just needed the wrong girls to save it.
Grade: A-
From Neon, “The Wrong Girls” is in theaters on Friday, August 14.
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