What You Wish For (2024)
Director & Writer: Nicholas Tomnay
Production Year: 2024
Country: United States
Genre: Black Comedy, Thriller
Running Time: 102 minutes
Cast: Nick Stahl, Tamsin Topolski, Juan Carlos Messier
Availability: Amazon Prime Video
I put on What You Wish For expecting a horror film and was pleasantly surprised to find that it is, for the most part, a black comedy with teeth. It does have violence, and it does have horror elements, but its real interest lies in how calmly it treats the obscene, and how much of its effect comes from understatement rather than shocks.
The plot, without spoilers, follows Ryan, a failed and desperate man who has fled to South America to escape gambling debts that are no longer merely financial. He reconnects with an old friend who appears to have solved all the problems Ryan cannot: money and security, plus a curious sort of professional autonomy. When that friend dies suddenly, Ryan makes the obvious bad decision and steps into a life he does not understand, believing that a fake identity and a little nerve will be enough to carry him through.
What he has wandered into is a discreet catering operation for the extremely rich, offering a culinary experience that is exclusive in a sense most restaurants would not dare advertise. The genius of the film is that it treats cannibalism not as madness, but as business. The language is corporate. The justifications are utilitarian. The people involved behave like middle managers enforcing unpleasant policies handed down from above. The horror lies precisely in how reasonable everyone sounds.
Nick Stahl is very good as Ryan. He plays him not as a hero or an innocent, but as a weak man who knows he is weak and resents the fact. His slow realisation that there is no clean exit is convincing, and his panic never tips into melodrama. Tamsin Topolski, as the agency representative, is chillingly calm. She speaks the language of corporate ethics with the confidence of someone who has never had to question them. Juan Carlos Messier provides a necessary physical menace, but even he is played with restraint.
The production is modest, and that works in the film’s favour. This is a low-budget film that knows exactly what it can afford and never pretends otherwise. The direction is tight, the pacing controlled, and the locations used intelligently. Nothing looks cheap, and nothing is wasted. It is the sort of film that reminds you how much damage can be done with a a sharp script delivered with conviction, and the refusal to over-explain.
What I liked most is that the film is funny in a dry, appalling way. The humour comes from watching evil presented as logistics. Bodies become “produce.” Murder becomes “harvesting.” Moral revulsion is treated as a temporary onboarding issue. It is less a film about cannibalism than about how any sufficiently rich institution can normalise anything.
At this point, it is hard not to digress. Every ruling class needs a bond of trust that holds its members loyal to one another. In an aristocracy of hereditary landowners, that bond is blood and marriage. It is shared circumstances. In a democracy, the rulers are usually men without honour and without history. They therefore need something else to bind them together.
One method, as we now know, has been shared sexual depravity. The Epstein revelations showed how many of the rich and powerful were involved, directly or indirectly, in sexual predation on the young. On the one hand, the powerful probably do have a taste for young flesh. On the other, paedophilia is so universally loathed by ordinary people that it serves as an excellent binding agent. Everyone involved has something to lose. Everyone is compromised. Loyalty is enforced by mutual destruction.
The difficulty is that the revelations have been so extensive that this particular vice has begun to lose its shock value. We now expect our betters to be involved in sexual abuse, and are scarcely surprised when the photographs leak. Normalisation is fatal to secrecy. When everyone important is assumed to be a paedophile, there is hardly any cost to being known as one.
In that case, something even more outrageous is required. It must be something that still repels, and therefore still binds. Ritual murder and cannibalism would serve perfectly. I am not claiming this film is a documentary. I am saying that, structurally, the idea is entirely plausible. When elites cease to share blood, they share guilt. When old crimes stop working, new ones must be invented.
Which brings me back to the film.
What You Wish For works because it never winks at the audience. It does not sermonise. It does not reassure us that “this could never happen.” It simply presents a system and lets it speak for itself. The result is unsettling without being hysterical, and funny without being frivolous.
I did not expect much from this film. I finished it amused and slightly more convinced that the world is run by people with appetites most of us would rather not examine too closely. As surprises go, that counts as an enjoyable evening.
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