The Wrong Girls Review Kristen Stewart Stoner Comedy

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

First time director Dylan Meyer’s female twist on the genre is let down by silly stereotypes and jokes that land with a thud

✍ Owen Myers

🕒 12 Aug 2026 23:00

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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 wide US theatrical roll-out 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 cut-out of Céline Dion, multiple cat towers and a contraption called the bong-o-tron – a complex rig of tubes and bubbling conical flasks – that fills the entirety of their coffee table. Being high all the time gives them a daffy kind of magical thinking, as they drive around town belting out power ballads and imagine that they are under the ocean with all manner of friendly sea creatures.

After being mistaken for her lookalike at a punk show, Frankie is entrusted with a briefcase full of experimental drugs which give the pair Matilda-like telekinetic powers, the ability to talk to their pet cats (voiced by Seth Rogan and Kumail Nanjiani), and sets off a chain of chaotic, intermittently funny events as the pair are pursued across Los Angeles by baddies who want their property back.

It’s clear that first-time director Dylan Meyer (also Stewart’s wife) has studied the stoner comedy. The Wrong Girls has all the touchstones of the genre, with slacker roommates at its center (Half Baked), rent that is due (Friday) and a novelty bong set up (take your pick). But she might not have taken the best lessons from them. The Wrong Girls has far too few laughs and a surprising lack of memorable setups. You can spot its jokes a mile off, like a sitcom’s Thanksgiving dinner episode that you know isn’t going to go well after someone leaves their weed gummies next to mom’s chewable vitamins.

Initially, it’s fun to watch the pair at its centre. Stewart’s character Frankie is the plucky one: she worked out how to steal the neighbors’ cable, helps the pair get out of whatever stoned scrapes they get into and has a tattoo on her left arm that reads “cool boobs”. Shawkat’s Molly has vague aspirations of being a chef, but the closest she comes to it is making fussily arranged plates of food for her roommate at the local all-you-can eat buffet. At a certain point I wondered just how high you would have to be to appreciate Meyer’s humor, which leans heavily on scenes where Mollie and Frankie get the munchies, or are too stoned to parallel park.

Other instances seem like blatant plays for meme-able moments: there’s no real reason for a character to put his penis in hummus apart from a punchline about “dick dip”, while another is named Herr Koch in what initially seems like a nod to Carol Reed’s The Third Man but turns out to just be an excuse to say a word that sounds like “cock”. What semblance of a plot there is begins to feel especially thin as the film spirals from one silly set-piece to another daft cameo, with a third act that plods despite the film’s relatively short 99-minute run-time. Most eye-rolling of all is Kate McKinnon’s mad Danish scientist, who the actor portrays with a risible accent seemingly modeled on Austin Powers’s Frau Farbissina.

The scenes where the characters trip are beautifully tactile with a DIY charm, as Frankie and Molly imagine themselves as mermaids with stunning cinematography from DP Todd Banhazl, who worked on Hustlers as well as recent videos for Olivia Rodrigo and Bruno Mars.

The best stoner comedies give you the sense of being let in on private in-jokes built on years of shared history (Broad City is the north star here). But Meyer’s characters feel underwritten with generic-feeling recurring bits about blue cheese brownies or the majesty of Dion. I am sure the movie was fun to make. But for those of us who weren’t on set, The Wrong Girls just feels high on its own supply.