He cleans it up and gives it to Clare as a gift. In the bins of a recently-deceased rich eccentric, Clare’s father finds a quaint Chinese musical box. She does however, have a very rich, but estranged, elderly uncle, and a sweetly maternal, caring neighbour (Sherilyn Fenn). Joey King ( The Conjuring) plays Clare Shannon, a 17-year-old who, 12 years after stumbling across the scene of her mother’s mysterious suicide, is grudgingly surviving the hell that is high school, buoyed up by her two friends, Meredith (Sydney Park) – the cute, spunky one, and June (Shannon Purser) – the plain, sensitive one.Ĭlare is consistently bullied by the ‘popular kids’ because she is unfashionable, strapped for cash, lives in an old dilapidated house and has a father (Ryan Phillippe) who, much to her embarrassment, likes to hunt through trash bins looking for unusual items to reuse or hoard. It is a fantasy horror directed by John Leonetti ( Annabelle) from a script by TV writer Barbara Marshall. Wish Upon fits snugly into the teen-scream category. The tortures of school life are a staple of movies blatantly aimed at the teen market, and they almost always offer up the same stock characters.

Minutes into Wish Upon, I sank into my seat as I again found myself watching the school misfit being harassed by the various forms of high-school ghoul mentioned above. Since before Stephen King’s Carrie, the High School has been portrayed as a veritable hell on earth, populated by monstrous predators such as bullies, snobs, bitches, sexist jocks and their various gormless minions. After decades of watching horror movies, one can only come to the conclusion that one of the most horrific places one can find oneself is in an American High School.

Wish upon the movie