Millennial Acting Icon Julia Stiles Makes Her Directorial Debut

It always feels sort of mean to criticize art that comes from a genuinely good place and has an inarguably empathetic message, but I was certainly tested by Wish You Were Here, yet another maudlin terminal-illness romance that works really, really hard to have something new to say about its paint-by-numbers plot. It doesn’t.

In the film, releasing Jan. 17, Charlotte (a surly Isabelle Fuhrman) works at a Mexican restaurant with her more outgoing friend and roommate Helen (Gabby Kono-Abdy), both of them stuck in the boring late-twenties portion of their lives. After a wild night out, Charlotte stumbles into Adam (Aladdin‘s Mena Massoud), a local artist whose creativity and spontaneity charm Charlotte into going home with him and spending the night.

The two while away the hours exchanging platitudes about their ideal futures, playfully imagining a serious relationship while giggling under the bedsheets in an intimate scene filmed like a dead-wife flashback from an action movie. But it’s Adam whose days are numbered, it turns out—though Charlotte doesn’t discover that until much later in the movie, after the morning brush-off, the tepid app date with a less exciting stranger, the moving-out fight with her roommate, and the random scene with Kelsey Grammer, who plays her father, singing Figaro off-key.

The only interesting thing about Wish You Were Here is that it happens to be the directorial debut of Julia Stiles, who was ostensibly moved enough by Renée Carlino’s bestselling romance novel that Stiles was working on the script while simultaneously filming the Orphan prequel Orphan: First Kill. Casting her co-star Fuhrman as the lead of a romantic drama is also a bold choice, given that Fuhrman often shines playing the sort of intense characters that fit into very different movies (an obsessive rower in The Novice, a murderous tribute in The Hunger Games). She’s good here as well, given what she has to work with, though her character is blank enough that she could have been played by anyone.

The official synopsis describes Charlotte as “wishing for a spark in her life,” but is she really? The film gives very little indication that she’s wishing for anything at all, content as she is to sleepwalk through her restaurant job and reject her family’s attempts to help her “put herself out there.” She comes to life only when presented with Adam, the stereotypical type of character not long for this world who has many philosophical things to say about life and death. There is a sort of capital-R Romance in stories about being with a person who may die soon (why else would there be so many of these movies out there?), but in this particular one it all feels very rote.

There’s nothing offensive about Wish You Were Here, nothing actively bad or wrongheaded about the way it meanders through its own narrative, but there’s really nothing else to it than an idea we’ve all seen played out again and again many times before, a formula so familiar that it’s already been inverted and deconstructed by John Green novels and Seth Rogen comedies from years ago. It’s fine to stick to the basics, but at least have something original to say about it all.