Directed By Meredith Alloway

Starring – Lili Reinhart, Victoria Pedretti, Alexandra Shipp

The Plot – Free Eden employee Apple (Reinhart) secretly runs a witchy femme cult in the basement of the mall store after hours, with fellow fruits Cherry (Pedretti) and Fig (Shipp). But when new hire Pumpkin (Lola Tung) challenges their performative sisterhood, the women are forced to face their own poisons or succumb to a bloody fate.

Rated R for strong violent content/gore, sexual content, nudity, adult language and brief drug use.

Forbidden Fruits | Official Trailer ft. Lili Reinhart & Lola Tung | HD | IFC Films

POSITIVES

If for some strange reason you’ve ever watched The Craft and Mean Girls, and thought that these films would be better not only if their material was emphasized heavily with an R-rating, but also co-existing in the same world with one another, then you might find yourself hypnotized under the spell of Meredith Alloway’s directorial debut, particularly in the cleverly campy ways that she pays homage to the mallrats of bygone age, while dissecting the depths of toxic femininity in a femme-fatale narrative that takes an abundance of chances with its material. For starters, the very tone and atmospheric personality of the movie evokes this underlining hilarity to straight-faced interactions that make every shallowly plastic focal point feel like they contain world-changing circumstance, crafted brilliantly by some Gen-Z lingo that would typically make me cringe with try-hard humility towards attaining a cool factor, but here comes across effortlessly natural in the depths of these characters, whom the audience intentionally and aspiringly shouldn’t relate to in the slightest. The women inside of this coven certainly aren’t who I would define as stupid or shamelessly naive, but they’re heavily influential in heavily dangerous ways where one bout of deception conjures Earth-shaking impact among them, in ways that heavily strains their seemingly unbreakable friendship, and considering the storytelling doesn’t always incite the most accessibly compelling outline to its 98-minute exploration, it’s the dramatic tension elicited within the ever-increasing deterioration of this group that kept me hanging onto my vested interests for dear life, paid off incredibly with some meticulously deposited carnage candy of heavily practical rendering that did make me squirm uncontrollably in my seat, especially during one such sequence involving an escalator. While it would be easy for someone to watch this film and prematurely determine that the horror components of its composing were heavily underutilized and barely registering outside of an all-bets-are-off kind of climax, I see Alloway as that kind of student who studied under the tree of Giallo horror movies before her, where atmosphere played a vital hand towards building up the tension before the gruesomely indulging releases unraveled something truly sinister, and considering the entirety of this movie takes place in and around this real-life on-site shopping center, it’s able to maintain that atmospheric tension with a claustrophobic brand of captivity that makes the coven’s influence feel practically inescapable, allowing the extensively persistent cinematography from Karim Hussain to explore its limitless confines of consumerism towards feeling like a fully fleshed out character of its one within this movie’s ensemble. Tack on some rhythmically increasing deviations in the editing from Hanna Park, and you get a snappier sensibility to the conflictual retorting between characters that serves as the punctuating exclamation points enamoring some of the movie’s inconsistent humorous material, in turn allowing some effective gags that mostly serve as a result of the ensemble’s unshakeable commitment to character, with each of their performances attuning so seamlessly to the kind of campy atmosphere that Alloway enables upon them. Because of such, we’re given career-best performances from everyone involved, but most dominantly by Victoria Pedretti, who undeniably steals the show as the show as Cherry, a lovable airhead with a high-pitched voice and ditsy demeanor who tragically conforms to a life lived for other people. While it’s easy to dismiss most of the ridiculousness that spews from Cherry’s thought-process, Pedretti performs her so helplessly vulnerably that you can’t help but feel empathy for a toxic friendship that she never feels strong enough to capably shake off, and with a couple of intimately revealing sequences that feel lifted from interview depositions from any reality show ever created, we start to speculate if Cherry holds all of the cards in this group’s dynamic, a feeling made all the more intoxicating by the way Pedretti leans as heavily into the character’s naivety as possible. The rest of the group might not reach the soaring heights of Pedretti’s mesmerizing work, but they each command attention with richly developed personalities that feel so authentically lived-in, on account of the psychology that each of them unload towards their characters, with Reinhart’s cold-hearted candidness of Apple doubling down on the kind of mean-spirited intensity that maliciously devolves into manipulative malevolence, while Tung’s Pumpkin ushers in a discomforting quiet that drives the ambiguous intentions of her character, in between Shipp embodying a tortured duality for Fig that serves as a result of her commitment to craft continuously clashing with her desire to live a normal life, and between these individual efforts and the constant radiating of lived-in chemistry between them, it proves the casting did an impeccable job towards bringing these characters to life, in turn crafting ample opportunity for each of them to shine, even if one disappears slightly more than others in their role.

NEGATIVES

Simply put, this is not a film that everyone in the audience will indulgingly vibe with, whether in the abrasive nature of its 2000’s girl-boss personality, or even in the contentious outlining of the aforementioned dialogue, which will have mature audiences feeling aged by characters and situational conflicts that very few of them can relate with. This wasn’t necessarily a problem to me, as I’ve always been able to take film at face value, rather than some deeper deconstruction towards my masculinity, but the tightly condensed audience that this movie does effectively speak towards inevitably will have its outlooking reach in messaging falling a bit flat in the overall bigger picture, and while I commend the movie for remaining faithful towards ushering in the kind of film and story that it wants to pursue, I can’t help but think about the uphill climb that it will face towards outsider audiences attempting something new to experience, especially in the confines of a screenplay that rarely ever pays off their curiosity with something meaningful to the big bombshell developments. It’s a big enough problem that the script leaves so many of the more compelling components unanswered, such as Gabrielle Union’s constantly heard but never seen store manager, but it’s even worse when the story’s most defining moments register so flatly in the kind of dramaticism that feel sloppily rushed and limitedly enacted, with so little of an emotional pay-off to characters presented a bit too shallowly to ever quite attain the kind of necessary humanity that optimistically drives their surmising contention with one another. The single biggest example of this is during the movie’s third act climax, involving the kind of earth-shattering bombshell of Pumpkin’s preconceived intentions that not only feels heavily predictable, on account of some of the previous story beats writing the big reveal into an inescapable corner, but also disappointingly flat alongside an unfulfilling resolution that demanded edginess when it really needed accountability, where so much previously attained momentum from the speculation of Pumpkin’s ambiguity doesn’t serve to register an ending that feels cathartically enriching for her character, and instead opts for the low-hanging fruit to convey that every town in America has toxicity in one form or another. Lastly, while the humor did attain quite a few laughs from me, mostly as a result of Pedretti’s impeccable timing towards delivering so many ridiculous lines, I would be lying if I said the material was anything but one-dimensional, especially considering the tonal dependency of the opening act begins as satirical, without anything to elevate it during the rest of the film. Most of the time, the gags themselves just come across as immature or obviously ill-timed and mean-spirited, making it difficult to swallow the believability of this group’s dynamic being one that has stretched years throughout so much internal discontent between them, and while the abundance of humor never sacrifices the inescapable claustrophobia of the atmosphere that drives Alloway’s tensely uncomfortable direction, it is the one element that feels vastly underutilized in a setting that mostly abandons the low-hanging fruit of mall monotony, attaining a couple of laughs along the way, sure, but too often with the redundancy of such a repetitious outline that feels like you’ve experienced everything that the movie has to offer during its opening twenty minutes, with confirmation coming from the eighty minutes that follow it.

OVERALL
Forbidden Fruits undeniably has the word-of-mouth ability to catch on as the next successor in the campy cult favorites category that ushered in similar installments like The Craft, Mean Girls, or Jawbreaker, but ultimately one that falls a bit short on those predecessors, on account of alienating aspects to a script that doesn’t keep us under its spell for 98 minutes of an entertainingly engaging experience. Despite its flaws in comedic consistency and dramatic impact, Meredith Alloway’s feature-length directorial debut is an at-times bloodily brutal, visually striking and perfectly performed spin into the superficial that pulls no punches about the toxicity of its callous culture, enacting the same kinds of popularity struggles and power dynamics of high school, but this time within the shop till you drop adult-free ferocity of a shopping mall.

My Grade: 6.3 or C+