Dylan Meyer has made her directorial debut with The Wrong Girls, a stoner comedy that pairs Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat as best friends Frankie and Molly. The film throws them into Los Angeles on psychedelic drugs made from giant squid fluids, which let them talk telepathically to each other and to their two cats, Dio and GG.
That is the kind of premise that sounds like a dare until Meyer explains where it came from: a real stretch of life she shared with her best friend Maggie McLean. Meyer said the two lived together for five years, a period she described as the happiest and safest years of her life, even as she also called them dysfunctional, broke and chaotic. That contradiction sits at the center of the movie. The warmth is real. So is the mess.
The timing matters because Meyer is not arriving here as a newcomer. She has already built a screenwriting career with films like XOXO and Moxie, but this is her first time directing a feature. She said she wrote the original draft in 2012, which makes the release feel less like a quick follow-up than a long-gestating payoff. She also said the project took 14 years to make, a span that fits a film rooted in memory, friendship and the kind of joke that keeps getting funnier the longer you sit with it.
Meyer’s own obsessions are baked into the setup. She said she has been fixated on giant squids since she saw 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea when she was five, and that fixation helps explain why the film’s drug mechanic is so specific. In the movie, the squid fluids are not just a strange flourish; they are the engine that turns Frankie and Molly’s high into a shared state, making their conversations and their cat chatter part of the same spiral. The result is a comedy built on the logic of what happens when friendship becomes chemistry, then gets even stranger.
She also said the movie grew out of a desire to make a girl-buddy story with the shambling rhythm of Dumb and Dumber, while drawing on the spirit of The Blue Planet, Romy and Michele's High School Reunion and Empire Records. That mix helps explain why The Wrong Girls feels both personal and deliberately unruly. Meyer has turned a five-year living arrangement into a feature built around two women, two cats and one very bad idea, and the only real question now is how much of that life will look familiar to the people who knew the original version of it best.
