If “The Wisher” were any more lifeless, it’d be sitting in a La-Z-Boy with a gravy stain on its shirt, yelling at the Price Is Right. Gavin Wilding’s 2002 Canadian horror flick stumbles in wearing a trench coat full of borrowed clichés and all the menace of a damp sponge. This movie isn’t scary—it’s the cinematic equivalent of finding out your Uber driver is your middle school gym teacher who still calls you “Champ.”
Let’s start with the plot, which feels like it was cobbled together from the abandoned scribbles of a sleep-deprived eighth grader who just watched The Ring, Wishmaster, and Goosebumps back-to-back on NyQuil. Liane Balaban plays Mary, a teenage girl addicted to horror movies—because apparently, that’s a diagnosable condition now. After her dad bans her from watching any more of that wicked devil cinema, she sneaks out to see a horror film called The Wisher, which is apparently so intense it makes her vomit five minutes in. If only we, the audience, were so lucky. Balaban, bless her, does what she can with the cinematic compost heap she’s been handed. As Mary, she’s the lone flicker of believability in a film otherwise drowning in nonsense. She brings a subtle, understated presence—an actual human emotion or two, which is more than anyone else manages between groans of exposition and telegraphed jump scares. You can see in her eyes that Mary is supposed to be unraveling psychologically, trapped between teenage angst and a descent into supernatural paranoia. And Balaban sells that—hell, she earns that. Unfortunately, she’s stuck reacting to cardboard characters and horror tropes recycled like they were fished out of a Blockbuster dumpster in 1998. It’s like watching an actual actress perform Hamlet while everyone around her is doing a haunted house sketch for a middle school talent show. She’s not the problem—she’s just the unlucky soul who got cast in The Wisher instead of literally anything else. In a better script, Balaban could’ve been a scream queen for the ages. Here, she’s just a Ferrari doing laps in a Chuck E. Cheese parking lot.
Ron Silver plays her dad, and you can almost see “I’ve got a mortgage payment due” worry in his eyes. His performance lands somewhere between “hasn’t slept in 12 days” and “just realized this movie isn’t The West Wing.” Poor guy’s acting like he’s trying to get out of the film using sheer willpower alone.
The titular villain, The Wisher, is a dollar store Freddy Krueger with the flair of a drunk arts-and-crafts teacher. His whole gimmick is granting wishes in the worst way possible—because nothing screams menace like malicious semantics. Mary says, “I wish he would leave me alone,” and wouldn’t you know it, the guy she’s talking about gets hit by a car. Terrifying! In the same way that a spilled Frappuccino is terrifying. He’s supposed to be this supernatural nightmare, but he looks like he got into a fight with a window display at Hot Topic.
The kills? Imagine if Final Destination was rewritten by a guy who thinks the scariest thing in life is bad Yelp reviews. There’s no blood, no dread, no tension—just a parade of laughable coincidences and bad lighting. And the climax? It makes Scooby-Doo mysteries look like David Lynch films. It’s a twist so pointless and unearned, it practically holds your head underwater while whispering, “It never mattered anyway.”
Also—Drew Lachey is here. That’s right. 98 Degrees Drew Lachey. Because nothing adds atmosphere to your horror movie like a boy band member with the acting range of a boiled yam.
And let’s talk about that title. The Wisher. It sounds like the off-brand knockoff of a Disney villain. A guy who grants wishes but can’t afford the licensing fees. “Step aside, Genie. I’m The Wisher. I work out of a strip mall behind a vape shop.”
There are horror films that stay with you—films that claw at the back of your brain like a shadow you can’t quite shake. The Wisher isn’t one of them. It’s the kind of movie you forget in real-time. A film so ineffective, it might actually cure someone’s fear of horror altogether. Watching it feels like being gaslit by a sentient VHS tape that only plays disappointment.
Final verdict: 1.5 out of 10. It’s like asking for a nightmare and getting a nap instead. If your biggest wish is to waste 87 minutes of your life, The Wisher is here to grant it.