The Australian Parliament, having passed the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024, which requires major platforms to take reasonable steps to prevent under-16s from holding accounts, might secretly watch the new Netflix series If Wishes Could Kill with a nodding smile. The series is a young adult horror revolving around a mysterious application that takes away a life in return for the wish it grants.
Set in a high school, it retains the familiar elements of teen drama—a budding romance, an aspiring athlete, and a family secret—yet at the same time leans toward a blood-splattering tint of the occult. As the application occupies the center of this horror story, one is naturally led to wonder whether it functions as a criticism of the technology condensed into something as small as a phone, an object that captures so many of us, particularly the young, under its thrall.
Certainly, the series works as an allegorical mirror of our current dependency on smartphones. However, it begins to suggest that what is under scrutiny may not be the device itself, but a broader structure of desire, exchange, and consequence in which the device merely serves as an interface.
The series follows five high school students—two girls and three boys. One of the girls is a long jump athlete, newly called up to the national reserve team, and is seeing a boy who also trains in the same sport. She believes their relationship remains unknown to the others, while another girl is quietly nurturing a crush on the same boy. The remaining two boys—a mathematical genius and a lovable Japanese animation buff—are largely unaware of this romantic entanglement.
This rather mundane, even peaceful setting cracks dramatically when the animation-loving boy tops the national math test and, the following day, cuts his throat with a heavy cutter knife, killing himself. He had made a wish to the mysterious application, Girigo, to achieve that very result, and the app takes his life in exchange for granting it. The boy appears content in his world of animation and the imaginative escape it provides. Yet, as becomes clear through his dabbling with Girigo, he harbored a quieter desire—to surpass his mathematically gifted friend. It is this concealed wish that draws him into the fatal promise of the cursed application.
High school life is not easy for anyone. It is entirely plausible that a student who is not academically outstanding might wish to improve his record, perhaps in rivalry with someone more accomplished. It is equally possible that his classmates would not support such ambitions—indeed, they might respond with cynicism or even ridicule, particularly if his past performance falls far short of his presumed rival. Failure would bring humiliation, a bruised pride, and the harsh resonance of a reality check. Success, on the other hand, would offer a familiar narrative of perseverance and achievement.
What distinguishes the series is that the application intervenes, making one’s deepest desire real—albeit at a devastating cost. Yet the premise of such an application is not entirely removed from reality. While no app can secure the top position in a national math test, it is far less implausible to imagine that other desires—such as popularity or recognition—appear to be granted through the everyday workings of smartphones.
The Structure Behind the Wish
If Wishes Could Kill evokes Carrie (1976, 2013), a story of the female body, adolescence, and religious fanaticism. The eponymous character is a teenage girl growing up under an imposed sense of guilt about her transformation into womanhood. Addled by a warped notion of God and redemption, her mother punishes Carrie’s natural development of mind and body. Carrie longs to be normal—to be accepted and loved. When that desire is betrayed through a spectacular act of humiliation, she unleashes her telekinetic power, fueled by rage, to destroy everything and everyone in her sight. As is well established in the history of cinema, the blood in these scenes operates as a complex metaphor for bodily transformation, as well as for the frustration and anger that accompany a distorted entry into adulthood. The discord between her awakening sexuality and the social grid that defines, molds, and often rejects such desire erupts into psychological chaos.
If Wishes Could Kill treads similar ground, but in a different register. In tracing the origin of the application’s curse, the long jump athlete and her group discover that a girl named Do Hye-ryong from the same school cursed the application with her blood after the public humiliation of her confessed feelings for a boy who rejects her. This mortifying drama of sexual awakening and social rejection was relayed not in a confined physical space, but across the digital. If Carrie releases her anger within the bounded space of the prom, Do could not do the same; her humiliation was not contained but dispersed, amplified to an indefinite public. It was therefore not only the intensity of the emotion but its scale of exposure that transformed her response. Do cursed the application—the very medium of her humiliation—by cutting her throat and letting her blood envelop the device.
The metaphor of blood in If Wishes Could Kill extends into an occult register, drawing on shamanistic notions of embodied emotion as a medium of force. The blood Do sheds onto the application condenses anger, remorse, and a desire for revenge into a material that can act upon the world. As suggested by the shaman figure in the series, the mind becomes the root and master of reality, with blood functioning as its extension. In combining this logic with the technological interface of the application, the series constructs a dynamic in which frustrated desire circulates through a cycle of anger and retaliation, moving from one subject to another.
What distinguishes the series from Carrie is precisely this convergence: the weaponization of affect through occult logic is fused with the operational mechanisms of the smartphone and social media. In doing so, If Wishes Could Kill extends its critique beyond individual trauma, toward a broader system in which desires for beauty, intimacy, and recognition are continuously produced, measured, and compared—often resulting in psychological damage, intensified rivalry, and forms of digital violence such as ridicule, slur, and cyberbullying.
Beyond Social Media
What the series ultimately suggests, then, is not simply the danger of a singular application, but the visibility of a broader mechanism already at work. The cursed app appears less as a supernatural anomaly than as a condensed model of a system in which desire is rendered visible, measurable, and comparable. Within such a system, emotions no longer remain internal or opaque; they are externalized, circulated, and subjected to forms of quantification that give them value only insofar as they can be seen, recognized, and evaluated by others.
In this sense, desire is not merely expressed but produced through interfaces that continuously invite comparison and intensify rivalry. Feelings—whether longing, envy, or humiliation—are drawn into a feedback loop in which they are amplified by their exposure and reshaped by the responses they generate. The promise of recognition becomes inseparable from the risk of exposure, and the pursuit of visibility carries with it the possibility of psychological rupture.
The application in If Wishes Could Kill makes this mechanism brutally explicit by attaching an immediate and irreversible cost to the fulfillment of desire. Yet its logic is not entirely foreign. It echoes a condition in which the measurement of affect—through attention, reaction, and comparison—structures how individuals come to understand themselves and others. In this light, the series does not simply warn against technology, but reveals a system in which the boundaries between desire, performance, and self-destruction are increasingly difficult to distinguish.