The Wrong Girls review – Kristen Stewart fumbles through forgettable stoner comedy

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First time director Dylan Meyer’s female twist on the genre is let down by silly stereotypes and jokes that land with a thud Want to feel old? Superbad turns 20 next year. It’s been decades since the stoner comedy ruled the box office. In fact, the genre’s best theatrically released film of recent years – the hilarious buddy movie One of Them Days – didn’t feature any weed smoking at all despite hitting all the usual outlandish beats of a stoner flick. If the streaming success of Hulu’s recent R-rated bong-ripper Pizza Movie is anything to go by, audiences would rather watch this particular strain of movie on the couch where they can spark up in peace. The Wrong Girls aims to reverse that trend with a nationwide US theatrical rollout by Neon, the arty distributor which propelled Parasite and Anora to Oscar glory. Best friends Molly ( Alia Shawkat ) and Frankie ( Kristen Stewart ) live in a PeeWee’s Playhouse-coded stoner cave with macrame decor, a life-size cutout of Céline Dion, mu...
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Home Sweet Home: Where Evil Lives review – fresh take on pregnant-woman-in-peril horror

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Unfolding in what looks like a single take, Thomas Sieben sends his protagonist into a house that’s haunted by historical trauma

When Maria (Nilam Farooq) shows up 37 weeks pregnant at the attractive but remote country home of her husband Viktor (David Kross), you sense immediately that no good can come of this. If a character is pregnant in a film, it’s about even odds that said pregnancy will function as a way to increase their vulnerability – though not all films take this as far as this nifty little low-budget horror movie from talented German director Thomas Sieben, which combines the haunted house subgenre with pregnant-woman-in-peril to nicely nerve-jangling effect.

Occult horror always needs a starting point, a first evil from which the later ghosties and bumps in the night derive. Some films take as their inciting incident a broader historical crime or atrocity and it’s into this category Home Sweet Home falls. The Herero and Nama genocide, conducted by imperial German forces against indigenous people in what is now Namibia, was the first genocide of the 20th century, and is the basis for subsequent terrors visited upon our heavily pregnant heroine. Paying a price for the actions of previous generations is a big theme in German horror, but by looking to an earlier period than the horrors of the Nazi regime, Sieben reminds us that genocidal white supremacism was not invented in the 1930s.

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