Name: Wishful Thinking
Director: Graham Parkes
Released: 2026
Duration: 105 min

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For tickets to the Armani Beauty Cinema Club Opening Night screening of Wishful Thinking, click here, or else scroll down to book the regular session of the film.

This SXSW Grand Jury Award–winning high-concept rom-com playfully questions the notion that love is the most powerful force in existence … for better or worse.

Charlie and Julia are deeply in love. They are also fundamentally incompatible – Charlie wants to get married and start a family; Julia doesn’t – and they spend as much time fighting as they do making up. Desperate to fix their relationship, they visit twin TikTok love gurus Tilly and Tilly, whose mysterious counsel reminds the couple how and why they fell for each other. It also unlocks something else, with earth-shattering repercussions … literally.

Cheekily interpreting the real-world implications of Rhonda Byrne’s pseudoscientific self-help hit The Secret, first-time feature director Graham Parkes creates a wonderfully witty, lived-in love story with a supernatural through-line that’s as hilarious as it is horrifying. Utilising ingenious split-screen techniques and capturing the stunning vistas of the Pacific Northwest, Parkes and cinematographer Christopher Ripley ensure the film looks incredible, while Lewis Pullman (The Testament of Ann Lee) and Maya Hawke (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, MIFF 2019; Stranger Things) are phenomenal as Charlie and Julia, exuding chemistry while anchoring every emotional heartbeat and delivering every punchline to perfection. With a supporting cast that includes Randall Park, Kate Berlant and Jon Hamm as himself in a brilliantly executed recurring bit, Wishful Thinking is a boldly original, funny and insightful study of the wonderful delusion at the heart of all love: that its exhilarating highs and heartbreaking lows can change the world.

“A wildly entertaining experience, underscored by jaw-dropping, gasp-inducing humour … It’s a blast of misery and euphoria bouncing off a filthy funhouse mirror, announcing the arrival of a director to watch.” – Variety

Writer/director Graham Parkes and composer Oliver Lewin are guests of the festival and will be in attendance at the Thursday 13 August Armani Beauty Cinema Club Opening Night session of the film.