Forbidden Fruits starts strong. Almost annoyingly so. We open on a scantily clad woman dancing, then another song kicks in immediately as we’re introduced to three of the central characters. It’s confident, loud, and very intentional. At first, it feels like The Craft for Gen Z, or Mean Girls if it spent too much time on TikTok and worked retail. That initial vibe works. For a minute.
The soundtrack goes hard. Truly. Pulling “Heaven” by DJ Sammy and the Ying Yang Twins’ “Whisper Song” is such a wildly specific choice that it tricks you into thinking the movie has real teeth. The needle drops are fantastic and honestly do the most work throughout the entire runtime.
The four leads commit. Lili Reinhart, Lola Tung, Victoria Pedretti, and Alexandra Shipp all show up and give this material way more energy than it deserves. Reinhart absolutely devours every single line of the painfully heightened dialogue. She is operating on a different plane and understands the assignment better than the movie itself does. Victoria Pedretti has genuinely never looked better on screen, transforming into a literal Barbie, and yes, she’s magnetic. Everyone is hot. Distractingly hot.
Unfortunately, hot people and a good soundtrack are not enough.
I watched Forbidden Fruits post-SXSW via a screener, and I am extremely thankful I didn’t see this during the festival. Wasting a random afternoon is one thing. Burning a precious festival slot on this would have been genuinely maddening.
This movie desperately wants to be saying something. About sisterhood. About capitalism. About Gen Z iconography. About performance. About femininity as ritual. About retail hell. It gestures at all of these themes and commits to none of them. The result is a film that feels bloated, unfocused, and somehow exhausting despite only running an hour and forty minutes. There is absolutely no universe in which this needed to be that long. This should have been a one-off episode of American Horror Stories. At most.
Its influences are painfully obvious. Mean Girls. The Craft. A little Jawbreaker. You can feel them hovering over every scene, but instead of remixing those references into something fresher or sharper, the film just kind of points at them and hopes that’s enough.
Visually, the movie is strong. The camera work and lighting are genuinely nice, and the mall setting gives the film an eerie, liminal quality that works in its favor. When the horror finally shows up, the kills are actually pretty cool. The problem is that it takes forever to get there, and by then, most viewers will already be checked out.
Emma Chamberlain’s character straight-up does not work. The performance feels flat, awkward, and out of sync with everyone else. On top of that, several plot threads are introduced only to be dropped entirely, never mentioned again, as if the script lost interest halfway through its own ideas.
The reveal is weird. Not fun-weird. Just dumb. And then the movie commits its biggest sin: it ends by congratulating itself. It truly believes it just delivered sharp commentary and clever insight, when in reality, it barely scratched the surface. It left me feeling like I had been cheated out of my time.
A lot of people are going to think this is better than it actually is because the cast is committed and the soundtrack slaps. I get it. There will absolutely be a rabid cult audience for this film. I will not be part of it.
The movie even sets itself up for a sequel, which is wild. I ask anyone and everyone involved to please move on to another project. This was not the banger you think it was.
I do think there’s an audience for Forbidden Fruits. I’m just not that audience. They’re all unbelievably hot. I just wish the movie justified that.
Jessie Hobson