Seth Rogen and Kumail Nanjiani Play the Cats in The Wrong Girls

The Wrong Girls opened in theatres on August 14 with a cast list that reads like somebody's joke, and the two funniest names on it never show their faces. Seth Rogen voices a house cat named Dio. Kumail Nanjiani voices a second cat named GG. That's the whole performance for both of them: two comedians, two animals, zero screen time.

The humans in front of the camera are Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat. Stewart plays Frankie, a Stanford engineering dropout who has quietly let a decade get away from her. Shawkat plays Molly, a culinary cannabis artist and the only person on earth who understands her. They're broke, they're codependent, and after an experimental drug enters the picture they can hear each other's thoughts. Rent is still due.

It's the first film Dylan Meyer has directed, from her own script. Neon is distributing. The running time is a tight 100 minutes, the rating is R, and critics have landed somewhere pleasant but unfussed — 62 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes from 29 reviews, with a 6.0 average score, and 61 out of 100 on Metacritic from 12 critics. That's not a masterpiece consensus. It's a good-night-out consensus, which is a harder thing to manufacture than it sounds.

What The Wrong Girls Is Actually About

Strip out the telepathy and you get a friendship movie about two people who've built a life so tangled that neither can leave it. The drug is the engine, not the point — it turns an ordinary money panic into a mistaken-identity mess neither woman is equipped to survive. The official synopsis is blunter than any review has managed to be:

Two codependent best friends living paycheck to paycheck and bong rip to bong rip get caught in a case of mistaken identity that throws their lives into chaos.

LaKeith Stanfield turns up as a character billed as Not Metal Head Dave. Zack Fox plays Josh. Tony Hale plays a man named Martin Flynn. The film was shot in Los Angeles across February and March 2025, which means roughly 17 months passed between the last day of filming and opening night — a long, ordinary wait for an independent comedy looking for the right release slot.

The Cameo Bench Is Deeper Than the Trailer Lets On

Meyer stacked the margins of this movie with people who did not need the work. Most of them appear for a scene or a few lines, and several are doing voice work only, which is part of why the credits keep surprising people who stay through them.

Two Voices You Already Know, Coming From Cats

Rogen's Dio and Nanjiani's GG are the film's running gag and its emotional escape hatch. Casting two of the most recognisable comic voices in North America and then hiding them inside pets is a genuinely odd choice, and it pays off precisely because you spend the first minute trying to place them.

A Deep Sea Expert Played by Cate Blanchett

Blanchett appears as a character credited simply as Deep Sea Expert. Geena Davis plays Dr. Olsen and Kate McKinnon plays Dr. Chapman. Three actors with that much wattage in roles that small tells you what kind of set this was — people showing up for a friend rather than a paycheque.

The Crew Nobody Talks About

Todd Banhazl shot it. Kathryn J. Schubert cut it. The score comes from garage-rock musician Ty Segall, which is a strange and specific hire for a comedy and does a lot of the work in making the film feel scuzzier and more alive than its premise suggests.

The Vancouver Thread Running Through It

Here's the bit Canadian viewers will enjoy. One of the production companies behind the film is Point Grey Pictures, the outfit run by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg and named after the Vancouver high school the pair attended together. The same partnership gave the genre Superbad and Pineapple Express. Nearly two decades on, they're producing a stoner comedy built around two women instead of two guys — and Rogen has demoted himself to a cat.

There's a second reason it plays differently here. Recreational cannabis has been legal across Canada since October 2018, so the transgressive charge that once powered American stoner comedies simply isn't available to a Canadian audience anymore. Which forces the movie to be funny about friendship, money and failure instead of funny about the drug. On the evidence of the reviews, it mostly is.

Should You Buy a Ticket This Weekend?

If you want something ambitious, this is not it, and the middling scores are honest about that. If you want 100 minutes with two performers who clearly like each other, and you don't mind a plot that wanders, it's an easy sell — and at 100 minutes it respects your evening in a way most summer releases don't.

Watch the second-weekend hold. Comedies live or die on word of mouth rather than opening night, so if it drops less than half, Neon has a genuine hit and Meyer gets a bigger budget next time. Check your local listings before Friday — smaller Neon titles often start in a handful of cities and widen only if the first numbers justify it.