Critic Reviews

It captures so well the insanity of the contradictions we–particularly women–have to live into daily.

The film is a witchy mall comedy that mostly keeps you under its spell.

Though their conflicts eventually lead to horror-movie violence, the cruelest fate, the movie implies, may be a professional life consigned to malls, overpriced novelty coffee drinks, and other commercial/cultural remnants of a millennial youth.

That's what makes Forbidden Fruits feel both timely and timeless. We rarely leave the inside of the mall, giving the film a claustrophobic feel. The girls use cell phones – it'd be strange if they didn't – but any recognizable social media are absent. It feels like a distinctly modern take on female friendship, but one that owes a great deal to the films that have come before it. And it's lost the sort of optimism that those films often came with.

If you don’t worry about the story and just immerse yourself in the gags, Alloway’s film is a must-watch for the Venn diagram overlap between Shudder subscribers and the slumber party crowd.

Alloway’s debut is a beautiful disaster that even at its weakest points has just enough glamor and guts to justify most genre girlies taking the journey eventually. Just don’t expect to find anything especially ripe, or rotten, once you check it out.

Forbidden Fruits can’t reconcile all of its influences and just ends up as a collection of references and high style without much staying power — it’s essentially the fast fashion of girly pop horror.

Beyond some decent performances that aren’t done justice by this script, and some fairly wild leaps into horror, Forbidden Fruits isn’t ripe, it’s just rotten.

Though Reinhart and Pedretti chew through the scenery with dedication, the film, directed and written by Meredith Alloway, is a vibes-only pastiche that has little to add to the satirical queen-bee subgenre besides some updated slang.