I Wish You All the Best: Honest Review — Is It Worth Watching? | 5.5/10

I Wish You All the Best stumbles where it should soar—a well-intentioned indie drama about queer resilience that gets swallowed by its own melodrama and spotty direction. The film has genuine moments of vulnerability, but they’re buried under a script that mistakes earnestness for depth.

The plot (no spoilers)

I Wish You All the Best follows a non-binary teenager exiled from their ultra-religious North Carolina household after coming out, forced to rebuild their life with an estranged sister and her husband in a new town. It’s a premise that could cut deep—the specificity of evangelical rejection, the fracture of family bonds, the isolation of being erased—but the film treats these wounds like decorative scars instead of real psychological damage.

The tone wavers between indie melancholy and sitcom resolution, never quite deciding if it wants to be a serious character study or a feel-good redemption arc. The setting (a generic suburban North Carolina town) barely registers as a real place, and the pacing drags during intimate scenes while rushing through the emotional payoffs that should devastate you.

Acting & direction

Corey Fogelmanis carries the film with a genuinely tender performance, particularly in scenes of quiet panic where their character wrestles with internalized shame and anxiety. Miles Gutierrez-Riley as the love interest has charming chemistry, though the script gives him nothing beyond “bisexual classmate with a good heart.” Alexandra Daddario and Cole Sprouse feel underused and somewhat performative in their supportive roles.

Dorfman’s direction is competent but anonymous—there’s nothing here that marks this as a vision, just a story being told competently enough not to offend anyone. The cinematography is beige, the score is manipulative (doing the emotional work the dialogue can’t manage), and the pacing stutters whenever the film needs to sit with real discomfort rather than rush toward reassurance.

The strengths

• Fogelmanis’s performance grounds the film with authenticity, capturing the exhaustion of constantly managing other people’s comfort around your identity.
• The film doesn’t shy away from depicting parental rejection as a genuine, ongoing trauma rather than something a montage can fix.
• There’s a refreshing lack of fetishization in how the queer relationships are portrayed—they’re simply allowed to exist without needing to be “special” or explained.

The weaknesses

• The dialogue is clunky and expository, with characters explaining their feelings instead of letting you discover them through observation and behavior.
• The sister and her husband feel like plot devices rather than fully realized people, existing only to provide housing and occasional wisdom that lands with all the subtlety of a PSA.
• The film’s anxiety about depicting too much pain leads to tonal whiplash—moments of real darkness are immediately undercut by soft-focus romantic scenes that feel tone-deaf.
• The climax involving the parents is handled with such restraint that it becomes mute, losing any chance to genuinely confront the film’s central conflict.

Who should watch it

If you’re seeking a coming-of-age drama with LGBTQ+ representation that prioritizes comfort over confrontation, this will resonate—compare it mentally to Love, Simon more than Heartstopper. The film works best for viewers who want validation that queer kids deserve kindness and found family, without needing the narrative to truly interrogate why that’s so rare. Teens navigating their own identity struggles may find Corey Fogelmanis‘s vulnerability personally meaningful, even if the direction around them is pedestrian.

Final verdict

I Wish You All the Best is well-meaning enough that it’s hard to dislike outright, but it’s forgettable enough that you won’t think about it a week later. The film had a chance to make something raw and necessary about parental rejection and queer adolescence, but instead it opted for safety—a nice story about nice people discovering that kindness exists, which nobody needed proved in 2025. Watch it for Fogelmanis‘s performance and the occasional moment of authentic vulnerability, but don’t expect the filmmaking to match the material’s emotional potential.