What You Wish For

What You Wish For is a 2023 American thriller film written and directed by Nicholas Tomnay, and starring Nick Stahl, Tamsin Topolski, Randy Vasquez, and Penelope Mitchell.

What You Wish For
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Nicholas Tomnay
Written by	Nicholas Tomnay
Produced by	Nicholas Tomnay Francesca Silvestri Kevin Chinoy
Starring	Nick Stahl Tamsin Topolski Randy Vasquez Penelope Mitchell
Cinematography	Mateo Guzmán
Edited by	Nicholas Tomnay
Music by	Jeff Russo Tracie Turnbull
Production companies	Evergreen Avenue Jaguar Bite Freestyle Picture Company
Distributed by	Magnet Releasing
Release dates	July 30, 2023 (2023-07-30) (Fantasia) May 31, 2024 (2024-05-31) (United States)
Running time	101 minutes
Country	United States
Languages	English Spanish
Box office	$6,279

What You Wish For premiered at the 2023 Fantasia International Film Festival. The film was released in select cinemas in the United States on 31 May 2024 by Magnet Releasing. It received generally favourable reviews from critics.

Plot

Ryan, a talented but down-on-his-luck chef, flees from his gambling problems to an unnamed Latin American country to meet with his friend and culinary school roommate Jack. The two of them catch up and befriend a tourist named Alice. They take Alice back to Jack's house where they let her decide who is the better cook, declaring Ryan the winner. However, she ends up sleeping with Jack, while Ryan continues to get texts from the gambling synidcate he owes money to threatening his mother.

The next day Ryan finds Jack has hanged himself from work pressure and remorse, Ryan sees his suicide as an opportunity to escape from his own financial difficulties. He assumes Jack's identity, accesses his computer, transfers all the money in Jack's bank account to his own, and manipulates the bank into giving him full access.

Eventually, Jack's boss, Imogen, arrives mistaking Ryan for Jack, and has him prepare for a dinner party. Ryan convinces her to give him his pay in advance, which he uses to pay off all his gambling debts protecting his mother. He then learns Jack cooked for a shady entertainment company specializing in illegal dinner events with human flesh for high-end clientele. Horrified, he has no choice but to go along with it. The company's killer "sources" a male local for Ryan to use as "meat produce". By chance the murdered man's uncle turns out to be a police detective, and comes with inquiries to the company's villa, he ends up sitting down to the dinner made from his nephew's flesh.

During the dinner, Alice arrives looking for Jack. She is confused to see Ryan posing as Jack for the dinner. For the final dish Ryan is to cook tongue sashimi, but discovers the tongue is infected with herpes. He is then forced to kill Alice and use her tongue in place.

Faced with disclosure from the company that there is no way for him to leave employment without becoming an "ingredient" in the company's next dinner event, Ryan confesses everything to the detective. The detective is killed at the end of the meal, with his flesh saved for the next event and with a falsified email purporting to explain his nephew's disappearance sent in his name to his sister.

The next day, Imogen has a tracking device implanted in Ryan so he doesn't escape them. She then sends him to South Africa for another dinner party. Flying out home to London at the airport the next day, Ryan appears to be resigned to his employment in the company and gives his name as "Jack" to a fellow traveler at the bar.

Cast

• Nick Stahl as Ryan
• Tamsin Topolski as Imogene
• Randy Vasquez as Detective Ruiz
• Penelope Mitchell as Alice
• Brian Groh as Jack
• Juan Carlos Messier as Maurice

Production

What You Wish For is the second feature written and directed by Nicholas Tomnay after his 2010 film The Perfect Host. The film was co-produced between Evergreen Avenue (the production company Tomnay co-founded) and Kevin Chinoy and Francesca Silvestri from Freestyle Picture Company, in conjunction with Jaguar Bite, a Colombian production services company from Bogotá.

In an interview for Chicago Critics Film Festival in May 2024, Tomnay said that after The Perfect Host he had written 12 different original scripts but failed to secure enough money from the film industry to make a feature from any of them, so he chose the screenplay of What You Wish For as his favourite and from which a film could be made for a low budget.

Principal photography was started in Colombia at a location south of Bogotá in autumn of 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic, after Tomnay and his wife had found sufficient funds to get the project under way, and after securing assistance from the Freestyle Picture producers. Tomnay intentionally wanted the film to be set in an unspecified country "somewhere in Latin America" to impart anonymity to "morality-tale aspect of the film".

Tomnay stated in the same May 2024 interview that inspiration for the film's script had come from "a disastrous school reunion with a couple of friends from Sydney" in Las Vegas. As guiding influences for the film he cited Patricia Highsmith's novel The Talented Mr Ripley, Rope by Alfred Hitchcock and Joseph Losey's film The Servant.

Release

What You Wish For premiered at the Fantasia International Film Festival on 30 July 2023. The film played in several other festivals, including FrightFest, Fantastic Fest, and Scream Fest. In January 2024, Magnet Releasing acquired the United States distribution rights to the film.

What You Wish For was released in select theatres and on digital in the United States by Magnet Releasing on 31 May 2024.

Reception

Box office

What You Wish For grossed $2,587 from 16 cinemas during its opening weekend in the United States.

Critical response

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 81% of 37 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.3/10. Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 66 out of 100, based on 7 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.

Mary Beth McAndrews from Dread Central wrote in her upbeat review: "What You Wish For is a delightfully skeezy thriller about desperation and searching for that one life-changing meal."

Glenn Kenny gave the film a positive review and compared its emotional impact to:

...Hitchcock's "Psycho" in which Norman Bates is dumping Marion Crane’s car, with her dead body in the trunk, into the swamp behind the Bates Motel. It sinks steadily for a while, then stalls, and we gasp. And we wonder, why are we gasping?

Kyle Smith of The Wall Street Journal was also positive: "The pleasure it brings is comfortingly old-fashioned." Michael Talbot Haynes at Film Threat gave the film an 8/10 rating: "What You Wish For is everything you could wish for in a well-lit plunge into the abyss."

Courtney Howard of Variety was less enthusiastic about the film, stating, "The obvious Aesop’s Fables-inspired lessons make what could’ve been an extraordinary meal into something far less memorable."

Fred Topel of United Press International also gave the film a negative review and wrote, "Plays like the B-movie knockoff of last year's The Menu. While Wish would have been in the works before The Menu premiered, a side-by-side comparison shows what the bigger studio version got so right."

External links

• What You Wish For (2023) on Magnet Releasing, film's official page on its distributor's website
• What You Wish For at IMDb