A film about the highs and lows of love, and how both can feel a little magical.
What if your love was strong enough to change the world? What if you had one person you were so connected to that you could shift the universe? What if The Secret was real and your mood manifested itself around you?
Doesn’t that sound exhausting?
These are the questions at the center of Wishful Thinking, the debut feature film from writer/director Graham Parkes, which debuted on the opening night of SXSW 2026. By wrapping a romance story around the idea that your happiness is determined by your ability to control your emotional state, Parkes weaves a mischievous film that oscillates between funny, somber, and sometimes sensual dimensions.
Julia and Charlie (Maya Hawke and Lewis Pullman respectively) have the textbook definition of a hot and cold relationship. One minute they are playfully flirting, giving each other sweet compliments and affirmations; the next they are at each others throats. Of course all couples have their ups and downs, but the swings are increasingly noticeable with Julia and Charlie. Their friends are growing concerned.
This is why they are sent to spiritualist relationships gurus the Tillies, twin sisters with the same name (both who are played to hilarious effect by Kate Berlant.) There they discover that their connection may run deeper than they realized, and come away with a clearer sense of how their frustrations with each other are more deeply connected to their frustrations with themselves.
They also walk away with a curse. Julia is the first to notice that when she and Charlie are getting along, good things happen in their orbit. When they are fighting, that’s when the bad things manifest. They test this theory by having a night where they really tear into each other, then transition in the most intense make up sex imaginable. The test case proves the theory, and the couple relishes in their newfound magical reality.
There is of course a catch: the power means they have to be happy together, all the time, forever. Fights increasingly cause bigger disasters, in part because the fights become tied to the idea that they actually manifesting things to hurt them. Julia’s career relies on her being nice to her boyfriend; Charlie might kill his mother if he doesn’t say the right thing.
This is obviously untenable to anyone who has ever been in a romantic relationship, and the crux of the film’s escalation is the tension building as they try to remain the positive course. But the move never truly tips over into fullflung horror, mostly because the detrimental effects, while real, are mostly kept at a darkly comical pitch.
It also helps that Hawke and Pullman have electric onscreen chemistry. Their highs and lows read equally natural, and Parkes’s script has plenty of playful patter for them to work with. A game supporting cast (Randall Park, Amita Rao, and especially Jake Shane) also allow the comic elements to the buoy the darker, more tragic themes under the skin.
Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the script is how Parkes taps into a real social tension of the moment. Charlie is ready to settle down and start a family, while Julia remains anxious and ambitious about establishing her career first; this reflects a real gender divide of concerns reflected in the world right now, but Parkes script ably doesn’t take sides in their differences. They want different things in their life, and that bleeds into almost every conflict, despite their undeniable pull towards each other.
The film ends in a way that feels earned, earnest and inevitable, but is still tinged with an awareness that love and partnership takes work. It’s hard to make things work out, and it takes every part of yourself. Luckily The Secret isn’t in fact real; we don’t manifest the good things around us through the force of willing them. But there is still a lot to be gleaned from how Julia, Charlie and their curse.
