When the Djinn Hits the Fan
If you’ve ever thought, “I wish I could get a solid supernatural horror flick with Lin Shaye, Tony Todd, and a cursed urn that grants wishes like a demonic Amazon Prime,” well—good news, your twisted little dream came true. The Final Wishis that rare beast: a horror movie that’s both sincerely spooky and hilariously over the top, like Wishmaster had a baby with Hallmark’s Family Reunion of Doom.
Directed by Timothy Woodward Jr. and written by Final Destination’s Jeffrey Reddick (which explains why everyone here dies in the most cosmic, self-inflicted ways imaginable), the film is a cautionary tale about greed, grief, and what happens when you try to sell cursed antiques on Craigslist. Spoiler: nothing good.
The Plot: The Monkey’s Paw, but With Extra Trauma
Meet Aaron Hammond (Michael Welch), a down-on-his-luck law school dropout whose career aspirations have gone the same way as his father—dead. Returning to his rural hometown after Dad’s funeral, Aaron finds himself stuck between his emotionally unstable mother (Lin Shaye, queen of elevated freakouts) and the world’s creepiest collection of old junk. Among the dusty trinkets: an antique urn that practically screams, “I contain evil! Please touch me!”
Naturally, Aaron does the one thing every horror protagonist does when confronted with a suspicious occult relic—he puts it on eBay.
Unbeknownst to our dense hero, this urn houses a malevolent djinn, a wish-granting demon whose idea of generosity is turning your life into an extended panic attack. Aaron starts blurting out wishes—casual, half-baked thoughts that immediately spiral into nightmare fuel. He wishes his mother could move on from his father’s death, and presto: she forgets everything, including her name, her son, and what the word “pants” means.
It’s like watching someone accidentally delete their mom’s hard drive.
Lin Shaye: The Patron Saint of Losing It on Screen
Lin Shaye once again proves she is the Meryl Streep of supernatural chaos. As Kate Hammond, she starts off as a grieving widow and slowly unravels into a full-blown banshee who may or may not be ballroom dancing with her husband’s corpse in a barn. (Yes, that actually happens.)
She’s magnificent—equal parts heartbreaking and deranged. At one point, when Aaron wishes his father away, she lashes out like an emotional tornado, as if someone told her ghosts aren’t real and she took it personally.
Watching Shaye in this movie is like watching someone win an Oscar for “Best Performance in a Scene Where You’re Covered in Ectoplasm.” She gives 110%, even when surrounded by plot logic that gives 12%.
The Curse of Dumb Decision-Making
Aaron, bless his stupid, doomed heart, keeps making wishes despite being told multiple times that he should probably stop. It’s the horror equivalent of repeatedly touching a hot stove and saying, “Maybe it’ll be cool this time.”
His first few wishes wreck his mother’s brain, resurrect his dead friend (who was actually dead the whole time—long story), and summon a djinn who taunts him with the energy of a toxic ex texting at 3 a.m.
Eventually, Aaron learns the rules from an antique dealer and a conveniently knowledgeable friend, Lisa (Melissa Bolona). They discover the urn is a Dybbuk box—because every horror movie since 2010 legally requires one. Cue the requisite visit to a creepy asylum, where the last guy who owned the box, now tongueless and deranged, writes ominous notes like “STOP AT SIX” and “DON’T FEED THE DEMON AFTER MIDNIGHT.”
Of course, Aaron doesn’t stop. Of course, he makes that seventh wish. Of course, it ends badly. This man couldn’t make a good decision if the djinn offered him one tax-free.
The Djinn: Part Genie, Part Life Coach From Hell
The demon itself is a delightfully snarky entity, voiced and performed with relish by Douglas Tait. This is no blue Robin Williams type of genie; this is a creature that grants your wishes and then reminds you that you should’ve read the fine print.
When Aaron wishes to stop hurting people, the djinn interprets it by killing everyone for him. It’s like outsourcing your moral failures to Satan.
By the end, the djinn doesn’t even need to trick him—Aaron’s doing most of the work himself. The demon just stands there, smirking, like it’s watching the world’s slowest car crash.
Tony Todd: Horror’s Voice of Authority
Whenever Tony Todd shows up, you know two things are guaranteed: he’ll sound like he’s narrating your funeral, and you’ll love every second of it. Here, he plays Colin, the antique expert who explains the film’s lore with the gravitas of a Shakespearean ghost. He could read a Taco Bell receipt and make it sound like a prophecy.
Sadly, he doesn’t get nearly enough screen time. He appears, warns everyone about the box, and then disappears—presumably to cash his paycheck and buy something nice that isn’t cursed.
Grief, Guilt, and the Great Cursed Urn Economy
At its dark, chaotic heart, The Final Wish is about grief and the terrible ways people try to control it. Aaron’s wishes all come from a place of guilt—trying to fix the unfixable—and that’s what makes the story oddly poignant beneath the gore and supernatural insanity.
Every wish feels like a metaphor for the stages of loss: denial, bargaining, and the part where your mom slow-dances with a corpse while a demon whispers sweet nothings from the shadows. (You know, the usual Kubler-Ross stuff.)
It’s weirdly moving, even when it’s ridiculous. The movie may be campy, but its emotional core holds surprisingly steady.
The Ending: Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Who’s the Dumbest of Them All?
By the end, Aaron is out of friends, family, and functioning brain cells. In a final act of desperate logic, he wishes that he’d died earlier in life, hoping to undo everything. The djinn, ever the trickster, grants his wish by trapping his soul in a mirror—which, metaphorically speaking, is exactly where Aaron belonged all along: staring at his own bad choices forever.
It’s poetic, twisted, and hilarious all at once. As his mom unknowingly sells the urn at a yard sale, passing the curse to some poor sap named Lisa, we realize that evil never dies—it just gets listed on Facebook Marketplace.
Why It Works (Even When It Shouldn’t)
The Final Wish works not because it’s flawless—it isn’t—but because it’s self-aware enough to be both serious and silly. It plays like a lost episode of The Twilight Zone directed by someone who really, really likes fog machines.
The scares are effective when they want to be, the performances (especially Shaye’s) sell the melodrama, and the dark humor sneaks in between the screams. There’s something deliciously ironic about watching a man keep making wishes even as his life collapses. It’s horror as cosmic slapstick—a tragicomedy about the dangers of saying “What’s the worst that could happen?” out loud.
Final Thoughts: The Wish That Keeps on Giving
Sure, The Final Wish may recycle familiar tropes—the cursed object, the doomed family, the ancient demon with a flair for irony—but it does so with enough conviction, style, and madness to keep you entertained. It’s campy, tragic, and occasionally profound in the way only horror films about bad decision-making can be.
Lin Shaye delivers a performance for the ages, Michael Welch screams his lungs out with sincerity, and Tony Todd blesses the film with his golden voice. It’s not high art, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun.
Verdict: ★★★★☆
A surprisingly touching horror movie about wishes gone wrong, grief gone worse, and the dangers of trying to sell haunted merchandise online. The moral: never trust an antique, and definitely never trust your own optimism.
