Maya Hawke, Lewis Pullman Romantic Dramedy

It’s not that Charlie (Lewis Pullman) and Julia (Maya Hawke) are no longer in love with each other. It’s obvious from the first minutes of Wishful Thinking, Graham Parkes’ clever and funny directorial debut, that they very much are, trading compliments with the friskiness of two people who know each other well enough to feel completely at ease, yet still find each other thrilling enough to flirt with.

It’s that for all the affection — warm, lively, sexy — coursing between them, they can’t seem to stop fighting. Case in point: Within moments of the exchange described above, the couple have talked themselves into an all-night cage match of an argument, packed with loaded phrases that make it clear they’ve been down this exact road many times before.

Were Julia and Charlie any other couple, this would be a problem for just them. In Wishful Thinking, a bit of karmic mojo turns it into a problem for everyone. Perhaps there’s something a bit solipsistic about the idea that reality itself might bend around how one’s own relationship is going. But don’t clichés like “happy wife, happy life” suggest we all understand the feeling?

Unable to get along but unwilling to break up, Charlie, a struggling musician, and Julia, an ambitious but frustrated video game designer, bemoan that there isn’t some magical fix for their issues. Then, suddenly, there is. At the insistence of a woo-woo friend (Sophie Lachman), they attend a couples-therapy seminar hosted by the Tillies, TikTok-famous twin gurus (Kate Berlant plays both) who preach concepts like manifestation and “twin flames.” Prompted to empathize with each other and remember what first attracted them (illustrated in a lovely split-screen flashback that juxtaposes her memory of their meet-cute against his), the couple go home feeling more blissfully in sync than they have in ages.

Soon, however, it becomes apparent that it’s not just their own moods that fluctuate with the state of their relationship. When they’re happy, all their hopes come true. Their plants thrive. Their careers advance. Even the crypto market, into which Charlie’s dopiest friend (Eric Rahill) had persuaded him to throw some coins, booms. When they’re fighting, their fears are realized: Furniture breaks, work sours, sea levels rise. Now their domestic bliss isn’t just a matter of personal fulfillment, but an imperative that has the potential to save the world or destroy it.

It’s a goofy premise that would be done no favors by thinking about the rules too hard. So, wisely, Parkes does not really try. Instead, he applies it as a Charlie Kaufman-lite thought experiment focused on exactly two people. Julia may fret about how their romance impacts world events (“I’ll handle climate change and you can get income inequality,” she suggests to Charlie) but even she finally comes to the conclusion — off-puttingly self-absorbed but, in the context of the film, logically sound — that for the sake of Charlie’s mom’s health or the fates of small island nations, “We just have to focus on us.”

Within that experiment are, initially, some very big laughs. I’d transcribe some of the best lines here, but that’d do no justice to the perfectly timed line deliveries from Hawke and especially Pullman (not to mention smaller appearances by Jake Shane as Julia’s overly devoted protégé Jeff or Amita Rao as her snarky best friend). A lengthy sequence of Julia and Charlie purposely pissing each other off to test their mystical ability is the film’s big comic centerpiece, but my favorite running gag involved a beloved Hollywood actor’s life hanging in the balance, on the basis of a bit of tossed-off snark from Charlie.

Without losing the sense of humor, Wishful Thinking starts to build in deeper feelings as well. The strong chemistry between Pullman and Hawke ensures that even at their worst, Charlie and Julia never come across as hateful. Their jabs come from a place of wounded love, not cruelty or contempt, and they’re never so furious that they can’t make each other laugh by trying to “sexy dance [their] way out of this,” swaying their hips to ’80s synth-pop classics.

It’s one thing, however, for the pair to scream about each other’s exes, or make up with incredible sex. It’s trickier for them to navigate less explosive but more deeply rooted mismatches, like Charlie’s frustration at Julia’s workaholism and Julia’s disinterest in getting married and starting a family. Or to figure out what to make of those spells when nothing’s really wrong, but nothing’s quite right, either.

In the face of such mundane but undeniable problems, even a connection fierce enough to conjure fireworks or earthquakes might have its limits. But Wishful Thinking’s last and most moving insight is that love can result in more than one kind of happy ending.