Stoner comedy The Wrong Girls overpacks its bong

The Wrong Girls is silly and giggly from the jump, filling the audience in on Molly and Frankie’s long-running jokes, backstory, and shared love of a Celine Dion cardboard cutout with a marijuana necklace. Meyer gives her wife Stewart a complicated role in Frankie—a brilliant Stanford dropout who’s capable of MacGyver-like inventions, who’s angry over her ex’s betrayal, who’s mad at anyone who isn’t Molly, and who might be one of the angriest on-screen stoners in cinema history. Shawkat’s Molly, on the other hand, is much more blissed out. She aspires to become a chef making weird culinary innovations (Blue cheese in brownies? Godspeed.), and is trustworthy to a fault, like when she leaves the secure briefcases with one of the men-in-white-suits. Molly thinks she’s about to sell the experimental drug to cover their overdue rent. To the surprise of no one in the audience, the man isn’t there when she returns. The duo’s uneven dynamic keeps the movie funny even when the plot starts to sputter. 

The Wrong Girls doesn’t drag from too little happening, but the script might overload a film ultimately aimed towards a very chill audience. With the newfound powers of the experimental drug, Frankie and Molly can now also hear their cats’ running commentary (voiced by Seth Rogen and Kumail Nanjiani) and telepathically communicate with each other, which creates some confusion for everyone else around them, including Not Metal Head Dave, his boss (Kate McKinnon), and a smarmy Stanford alum (Tony Hale) whose party the women crash to sell their illicit goods. Meyer and her stars even relish in figuring out what an experimental acid drop would do to two chronic tokers, creating colorful, wild sequences that harken back to 1967’s The Trip.

Watching The Wrong Girls, it’s funny to realize how rarely audiences get to see women behave like guys, but on their own terms. In many guy-centric stoner movies, women are the love interests or the scolds telling the guys to get their life together. Here, the women are given the space to be fuck-ups, to disagree on what to do with their future, and make many, many mistakes along the way. Yes, the main characters’ home is messy and their tricked-out bong is packed, but their home is also deliriously colorful, full of memories and tchotchkes like a low-rent Pee Wee’s Playhouse. Their outfits are also chaotically assembled, a mix of well-worn thrifting wares and jokey beach clothes, channeling a laid-back California vibe. The Wrong Girls is playing with the stoner aesthetic, and giving its own pink squid-inflected riff on a familiar type of comedy. 

The stoner comedy tries to stay goofy enough to keep the audience laughing, while also keeping the action moving so that viewers don’t check out. The Wrong Girls never quite becomes a surefire comedy, but it does well to keep Frankie and Molly running through international killers, a medical conspiracy, and super-strength edibles that enhance their newfound powers. It’s just that all that action comes at the expense of the jokes, or at least funny ones, and by the movie’s end, it’s mostly a relief that the trip is finally over. 

Director: Dylan Meyer
Writers: Dylan Meyer
Starring: Kristen Stewart, Alia Shawkat, Tony Hale, LaKeith Stanfield, Seth Rogen, Kumail Nanjiani, Chris Estrada, Geena Davis
Release Date: August 14, 2026