What You Wish For

What You Wish For is a 2023 American thriller film written and directed by Nicholas Tomnay, and starring Nick Stahl, Tamsin Topolski, Randy Vasquez, and Penelope Mitchell.

What You Wish For premiered at the 2023 Fantasia International Film Festival. The film was released in select cinemas in the United States on 31 May 2024 by Magnet Releasing. It received generally favourable reviews from critics.

Plot
Ryan, a talented but down-on-his-luck chef, flees from his gambling problems to an unnamed Latin American country to meet with his friend Jack, whom he has not seen for several years and who now cooks for a shady entertainment company specialising in illegal dinner events with human flesh for high-end clientele. When Jack hangs himself from work pressure and remorse, Ryan sees his suicide as an opportunity to escape from his own financial difficulties. He assumes Jack's identity to cook an important meal for the clients of the company, after the company's killer "sources" a male local for Ryan to use as "meat produce". By chance the murdered man's uncle turns out to be a police detective, and when the detective comes with inquiries to the company's villa, he ends up sitting down to the dinner made from his nephew's flesh. Faced with disclosure from the company that there is no way for him to leave employment without becoming an "ingredient" in the company's next dinner event, Ryan confesses everything to the detective. The detective is killed at the end of the meal, with his flesh saved for the next event and with a falsified email purporting to explain his nephew's disappearance sent in his name to his sister.

Flying out home to London at the airport the next day, Ryan appears to be resigned to his employment in the company and gives his name as "Jack" to a fellow traveller at the bar.

Cast

 * Nick Stahl as Ryan
 * Tamsin Topolski as Imogene
 * Randy Vasquez as Detective Ruiz
 * Penelope Mitchell as Alice
 * Brian Groh as Jack
 * Juan Carlos Messier as Maurice

Production
What You Wish For is the second feature written and directed by Nicholas Tomnay after his 2010 film The Perfect Host. The film was co-produced between Evergreen Avenue (the production company Tomnay co-founded) and Kevin Chinoy and Francesca Silvestri from Freestyle Picture Company, in conjunction with Jaguar Bite, a Columbian production services company from Bogotá.

In an interview for Chicago Critics Film Festival in May 2024, Tomnay said that after The Perfect Host he had written 12 different original scripts but failed to secure enough money from the film industry to make a feature from any of them, so he chose the screenplay of What You Wish For as his favourite and from which a film could be made for a low budget.

Principal photography was started in Colombia at a location south of Bogotá in autumn of 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic, after Tomnay and his wife had found sufficient funds to get the project under way, and after securing assistance from the Freestyle Picture producers. Tomnay intentionally wanted the film to be set in an unspecified country "somewhere in Latin America" to impart anonymity to "morality-tale aspect of the film".

Tomnay stated in the same May 2024 interview that inspiration for the film's script had come from "a disastrous school reunion with a couple of friends from Sydney" in Las Vegas. As guiding influences for the film he cited Patricia Highsmith's novel The Talented Mr Ripley, Rope by Alfred Hitchcock and Joseph Losey's film The Servant.

Release
What You Wish For premiered at the Fantasia International Film Festival on 30 July 2023. The film played in several other festivals, including FrightFest, Fantastic Fest, and Scream Fest. In January 2024, Magnet Releasing acquired the United States distribution rights to the film.

What You Wish For was released in select theatres and on digital in the United States by Magnet Releasing on 31 May 2024.

Box office
What You Wish For grossed $2,587 from 16 cinemas during its opening weekend in the United States.

Critical response
Mary Beth McAndrews from Dread Central wrote in her upbeat review: "What You Wish For is a delightfully skeezy thriller about desperation and searching for that one life-changing meal."

Glenn Kenny gave the film a positive review and compared its emotional impact to: "...Hitchcock's 'Psycho' in which Norman Bates is dumping Marion Crane’s car, with her dead body in the trunk, into the swamp behind the Bates Motel. It sinks steadily for a while, then stalls, and we gasp. And we wonder, why are we gasping?" Kyle Smith of The Wall Street Journal was also positive: "The pleasure it brings is comfortingly old-fashioned." Michael Talbot Haynes at Film Threat gave the film an 8/10 rating: "What You Wish For is everything you could wish for in a well-lit plunge into the abyss."

Courtney Howard of Variety was less enthusiastic about the film, stating, "The obvious Aesop’s Fables-inspired lessons make what could’ve been an extraordinary meal into something far less memorable."

Fred Topel of United Press International also gave the film a negative review and wrote, "Plays like the B-movie knockoff of last year's The Menu. While Wish would have been in the works before The Menu premiered, a side-by-side comparison shows what the bigger studio version got so right."