“Wishful Thinking,” the fantastic feature debut of writer/director Graham Parkes starring a never-better duo of Maya Hawke and Lewis Pullman, is a film worth falling in love with even as its characters are at constant risk of the fragile love they’ve built falling apart.
Like the great “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” crossed with the underrated “Like Crazy” and shot against the beautifully unique, yet still perpetually underutilized, textures of the Pacific Northwest, it’s a work that’s as wondrously whimsical as it is deeply, profoundly emotional. It’s a riot of a romantic dramedy with love, its pain, pleasures, and perils, all at the front of mind as it manifests (literally) the ways all the tumultuous emotions of one of life’s greatest joys can impact the way you experience the world. At each and every turn, it’s a film that bottles up the buzzy feeling of falling in love while also capturing what can happen when you shake said bottle and everything comes bursting out. You can get fireworks, or you can get a destructive explosion.
This is something that Parkes uses to remarkable, often gut-bustingly funny effect, before he then brings the emotional hammer down in moments of both quiet contemplation and joyous dance. As we see in his familiar yet also off-kilter world, which involves some of the best split-screen sequences you’ll ever see, everything is always on the cusp of potential exuberant jubilation, just as it is emotional devastation. It’s a film about feeling deeply and how amazing that can be, as well as the immense agony that can result when these deep feelings turn into conflict…