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Sick Girl Review: Nina Dobrev Leads a Deflating Cringe Comedy About Mending Fractured Fe

A little white lie turns into a big problem for one stunted screw-up in this surprisingly unsatisfying feature.

In “Sick Girl,” Nina Dobrev’s desperate character Wren fibs to her best friends about having cancer in an ill-judged attempt to fix the fissures in their group dynamic. While the movie holds Wren accountable for her poor decision making, it doesn’t give her enough hilarious or heartrending moments to justify the journey it asks audiences to take. This is the ultimate disappointment of writer-director Jennifer Cram’s cringe comedy. On paper, it contains admirable notions about adult female friendships and the need to maintain that vital bond. In execution, however, those stirring sentiments are tested by taxing hijinks.

Thirtysomething Wren has not evolved since her late teens, when she and her three closest pals made a road-trip pact to stay best friends forever. Fifteen years later, although living near one another in the same city, the girl gang has grown emotionally disconnected. Fitness-minded Laurel (Sherry Cola) is hyper-focused on competitive marathons and a new romantic relationship. Girl boss Jill’s (Hayley Magnus) attention is glued to her cellphone, her demanding toddler and her bickering husband. Exhausted parent Cece (Stephanie Koenig) is agonizing over the monotony of mothering a demanding daughter. Meanwhile, party gal Wren is busy smoking, binge drinking and fighting at night, as well as frittering her days away behind the counter at a stationery store (the only clever aspect of her character, who is physically and emotionally stationary in life).

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Fearing their friendship may be irreparably broken and looking to get out of hot water after a disastrous dinner, a flustered Wren blurts out a lie that she has cancer. When she’s finally pressed for the details of her illness (which oddly wasn’t inquired about at the time of her “revelation”), she goes with tonsil cancer, digging her metaphorical grave deeper. She realizes it’s an abhorrent, self-destructive act, but it’s one she assumes she can quickly remedy after her squad rallies and reforms their special sisterhood. To her chagrin, her plan spirals out of control when her friends go above and beyond for her, placing her in awkward situations where she’s forced to lie to the public, her parents (Dan Bakkedahl and Wendi McLendon-Covey) and an actual cancer patient she befriends at a support group, named Leo (Brandon Mychal Smith).

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Cram continually keeps us locked into Wren’s frazzled psyche through aesthetic techniques, from putting the camera on a Lazy Susan at her torturous birthday dinner, emphasizing her rigorous boredom, to shots that mimic her heightened anxiety and blurred drunken stupors. Since Wren suffers from a messed-up and impulsive mindset, we never question why she’s not quick-witted enough to figure out answers that don’t invite scrutiny. Composer Patrick Stump, whose band Fall Out Boy provides the movie’s opening throwback track “Sugar, We’re Goin Down,” musically keys into character. Cram and Stump practice the right amount of restraint with this, so it’s not overbearing, but rather complementary to the action motoring the scenes and montages. The dual needle drops on The Echo Friendly’s “Same Mistakes” — which acts like a sonic inner voice for Wren’s troubles — provide a nifty aural bookend for her arc.

Dobrev, who’s enchanting as a leading lady, cloaks her character’s despicable deception and selfishness in empathy, grace and vulnerability, tapping into an underlying rooting interest. But she’s not a miracle worker. The filmmaker holds back on fashioning Wren’s struggles as entertaining and complex, nor does she craft a space where her motivations resound properly. Cola, whose recent performance in “Joy Ride” brilliantly married humor and heart, is incredibly underutilized, as are Koenig and Magnus. Their screen time only serves to highlight what assets they could’ve been if their interpersonal dialogue and individual comedic moments were more strongly fabricated.

Beyond the lead, and despite the actors trying their best to elevate the thin material, supporting characters are barely two dimensional. Leo’s afforded a modicum of internality as Wren’s pseudo-love interest and third-act morality coach, which is more than the cadre of women are given. None of her friends mature from her assigned descriptor; their personal problems aren’t given much thought or resolution. It plays like the start of a joke without a punchline where a mom, an athlete, a business woman and a slacker walk into a bar. (This becomes an actual sequence in the film that ends with the gals stuck in lockup after picking a fight with a group of twentysomething girlies in a nightclub.)

Undoubtedly, Cram’s film will invite comparisons to Vanessa Bayer’s recent Showtime series “I Love That for You,” as it contains a similar premise of a woman who fakes a cancer diagnosis in an act of desperation to get what she wants. But that’s where the two diverge, as the show spins its protagonist’s strife into funnier, heartfelt scenarios. With this picture’s narrative conceits and construction issues, audiences will feel slighted that they didn’t see better treatment afforded these sickly characters.

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‘Sick Girl’ Review: Nina Dobrev Leads a Deflating Cringe Comedy About Mending Fractured Female Friendships

Reviewed online, Oct. 12, 2023. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 98 MIN.

  • Production: A Lionsgate release of a Grindstone Entertainment presentation of a Whereabouts Unknown, Red Clay Studios production. Producers: Sean McEwen, Jessica Wilde, Cassidy Lunnen, John Papsidera. Executive producers: Takashi Cheng, Nina Dobrev.
  • Crew: Director: Jennifer Cram. Screenplay: Jennifer Cram. Camera: Ante Cheng. Editor: Collin Pittier, Monica Salazar, Joshua Salzberg. Music: Patrick Stump.
  • With: Nina Dobrev, Brandon Mychal Smith, Sherry Cola, Stephanie Koenig, Hayley Magnus, Dan Bakkedahl, Wendi McLendon-Covey.

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