An Australian tourist in Cambodia, and storytelling, go missing in “Wish You Were Here,” a dull drama about domestic squabbling that hopes to be mistaken for a thriller.
Joel Edgerton plays Dave, a decent husband from Sydney, who makes a couple of mistakes on a vacation in Cambodia with his pregnant wife Alice (Felicity Price, who also co-wrote the turgid script), her sister (Teresa Palmer) and the sister’s boyfriend Jeremy (Antony Starr).
Jeremy vanishes, and we don’t find out what happened to him till the end, but it’s no great mystery, nor is the explanation interesting or satisfying. In between start and finish, we are treated to endless scenes of Dave and Alice quarreling as the stress of the unresolved case and Dave’s imperfections tear them apart.
Rather than building a story with a chain of events, though, the film simply spins its wheels while withholding its big “reveal” until long past the point when anyone will care; it could end at any point if one character would simply give a couple of sentences of explanation.