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.