You want to know what goes together like two peas in a pod, sisterhood and witchcraft. We have seen it in films like The Craft, Practical Magic, Suspiria, and The Witches of Eastwick. But what if you take that exploration and combine it with the mean satire seen in Mean Girls and Jennifer’s Body? That potion, brewed by Meredith Alloway in her directorial debut is Forbidden Fruits. A dark satire about what it means to be a girl’s girl.
Free Eden employee Apple (Lili Reinhart, Riverdale) secretly runs a witchy femme cult in the basement of the mall after hours. She is joined by her fellow Fruits, Cherry (Victoria Pedretti, The Haunting of Hill House) and Fig (Alexandra Shipp, Straight Outta Compton). But when the new hire Pumpkin (Lola Tung, The Summer I Turned Pretty) challenges their performative sisterhood, the women are forced to face their own poisons or succumb to a bloody fate.
There is a lot to admire about Forbidden Fruits. The costume design is bright and colorful. The ensemble cast is perfectly in-tune with the film’s tone. And the film’s sharp satirical tone on the messy and complicated friendships between women. On paper, Alloway has all of the right ingredients for a biting dark horror-comedy. But in practice, it never quite lands as it keeps circling the familiar tropes that we have seen countless of times before.
To simply state it, Forbidden Fruits is a mash-up of The Craft and Mean Girls. However, unlike The Craft, The Fruits are not actually witches. They have appropriated the aesthetics and performance of witchcraft to create a toxic hierarchy. And where you expect that tension between the Fruits to simmer and spiral as the group dynamic begins to fracture from their own toxicity, like in Mean Girls, the film rushes it, cramming the real chaos into the final fifteen minutes. It is less of a slow burn and more of a late scramble, which ends up being more frustrating than satisfying.
This disconnect primarily comes from the film being afraid of being mean. The Fruits constantly insist on their closeness, their loyalty, and their love for one another. But the second things get uncomfortable, they default to gossip, manipulation, and rule-breaking (even their own arbitrary ones like communicating only through emojis). There is a genuinely rich idea here about the competitiveness, the insecurities, and the toxic femininity that festers in tight-knit friendships. However, the film keeps pulling back its punches, even when the final act is full of hair-pulling, screaming and nails being ripped off. For a film that wants to be savage, Forbidden Fruits plays it safe.
That said, Forbidden Fruits is still a pretty entertaining ride. When it leans into its sense of humor, it’s a genuinely sharp, rapid-fire satire of wit and absurdity that made Mean Girls so special. And when it finally commits to being nasty, it absolutely delivers it in a glorious bloodbath. It is an easy crowd-pleaser destined to become a cult classic like The Craft and Mean Girls. There is a mean version of this film that sadly can’t break through. But there is enough style, humor, and late-game chaos there to give it a second life.
My Rating: B-
Forbidden Fruits comes to theaters March 27th.
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