“FORBIDDEN FRUITS” IS “MEAN GIRLS” WITH A SIDE OF WITCH FEMME CAMP CULT
Updated: 9 hours ago
Forbidden Fruits comes out the gate making one thing clear: girl gangs are power structures first, friendships second. They pull you in, dress you up, then make you earn your place over and over again. Belonging, here, is conditional, tightly controlled, and constantly at risk. And once you’re inside, you’re not just part of the group, you’re expected to perform.
The film enters that lineage of films that understand this instinctively. It treats female friendship not as a site of uncomplicated intimacy, but as a charged ecosystem where power, desire, imitation, and violence sit uncomfortably close together. And what makes the film interesting isn’t just what it depicts, but what it taps into: a long-standing cultural fascination with the girl gang as both a sanctuary and a threat.
A sales girl not yet a sales woman.
From the opening moments of Meredith Alloway’s feature debut, which sees one of its character, Apple, throw her scalding latte on the penis of a bystander crudely jerking off to her, it’s clear that the director not only has a vision but something righteous and incendiary to say.
Not all may be won over by the film’s aggressively campy tone, but this one is for those who like their sisterhood slashers dashed with sapphic yearning, divine femininity, and an exploration of how we’ll deny who we are just to feel a part of something larger than ourselves. It operates at a more cosmically tragic level if you devote your time to it, but it works just as well if consumed in the background of a sleepover where the gossip and liquor are flowing freely.
Set almost entirely inside a Dallas mall boho chic storefront called Free Eden, (a thinly veiled Free People) Forbidden Fruits follows the aforementioned Apple (played by an oddly intoxicating Lili Reinhart), a retail girlboss with a God complex, who runs a secret femme witch cult in the store’s basement after hours. She’s curt and controlling, but she’s also just cunt, and maybe that’s exactly why the girls are willing to do pretty much anything to maintain the peace...Every pack needs a leader.
Her inner circle includes Fig (played by Alexandra Shipp, playfully leaning into the nerdiness beneath the facade of flawless cool) is seemingly the most self-sufficient one of the bunch. And Cherry (played by You's Victoria Pedretti) with her hyper-feminine softness, who's as deeply tragic as she is immensely funny, and feels like a living homage to the woman they all idolize and admire: Marilyn Monroe.
These girls move like a unit. Speak like a unit. They size people up within seconds and know exactly how to play them. They sharpen their personalities to create desire, to close a sale, to make customers feel like buying into Free Eden might also mean buying into whatever it is these women have as they cultivate an atmosphere that feels equal parts aspirational and vaguely sacred.
And what they have—at least from the outside—is each other.
Their little empire is disrupted when Pumpkin (The Summer I Turned Pretty’s Lola Tung), an employee at the mall's pretzel stand, approaches them with free samples. Apple initially treats her like something that crawled out of a public restroom. Food court workers are apparently beneath her. But Fig takes a liking to Pumpkin, and when the group discovers that her name conveniently fits their produce-based aesthetic, they invite her to interview for an opening at Free Eden.
Pumpkin wants in, badly. And after an awkward interview, Apple instructs her to return after the mall closes for a second, considerably stranger audition.
That's when Pumpkin discovers what the Fruits actually get up to after hours.
Hidden inside Free Eden is Paradise, a makeshift sanctuary where the women gather to perform rituals, confess their sins, and commune with their chosen spiritual icon, Marilyn Monroe. Their religion, such as it is, revolves around female empowerment, unquestioning loyalty, and a strict rejection of men. Boyfriends are forbidden.
Apple insists that everything they do is about making women shine. Of course, she's the one who gets to decide what that means.
Pumpkin's initiation involves a concoction of fruit juice, blood, and tears, followed by a confession to Marilyn. She's then abandoned inside the locked store overnight, presumably as some sort of spiritual test. When the Fruits return the following morning, they discover that Pumpkin has given herself a fabulous makeover.
She's officially one of the sisters. But the sisterhood has secrets.
Before Pumpkin arrived, there was a fourth Fruit named Pickle (Emma Chamberlain), whose relationship with a man named Ashton landed her on Apple's bad side. After the coven performed a hex against him, Ashton mysteriously fell into a coma, and Pickle suffered a breakdown that landed her in a psychiatric facility. Now she's back at the mall, wandering around in a visibly distressed state and warning Pumpkin to stay away from Apple.
Apple, meanwhile, likes to act like she owns the mall, she's secretly living out of her car, her mother refuses to speak to her, and there's the small matter of her allegedly poisoning her abusive father to death.
Pumpkin isn't quite the innocent newcomer she appears to be, either. She's secretly installed a camera inside a Marilyn Monroe doll she gifted Apple and has been gathering evidence against her.
And all of this backstabbing and side stepping and lies culminates in the the bloodiest bloodbath since Carrie at the prom.
There’s also witchcraft threaded through the film—rituals, chants, blood, a moment where they string together nonsense words as a kind of prayer (or curse) while pouring emotion into a gaudy boot. It's half-serious, half-aesthetic, gesturing toward something deeper. But the true system at play here is social, not supernatural.
The magic is belonging.
Goats milk, thigh gaps, rose petals, bone caps.
The film plays out like one that knows you're in on the joke. The girls flirt with customers, swap gossip in dressing rooms, and then, once the gates come down, descend into the basement for wine-that’s-definitely-not-wine and confessionals.
And from the very moment it kicks off, Forbidden Fruits feels like a throwback to a bygone era of cunty girl cinema. Adapted from Lily Houghton’s play "Of the woman came the beginning of sin and through her we all die" and produced by none other than Diablo Cody, the film has a deceptively simple premise: A young woman joins a stunning group of mall retail workers and tries to navigate their performative sisterhood. And, well, who among us hasn’t been seduced by the allure of a cool-looking gaggle of gals? Especially one with a ginger Lili Reinhart at the helm.
Reinhart weaponizes a dead-eyed gaze of control. It’s all about the little gestures, the offbeat reactions, and the subtle sensuality behind the way she presents her own ideas as something truly good for you. Plus, in her mind, she’s just trying to create a utopic world for herself and the women around her. Who could blame her for trying?
Well, everyone can. And that loathing, envy, manipulation, and tragedy is what drives Forbidden Fruits. Perhaps it isn’t nearly as tight as it could be, sort of sprawling in all directions after its run out of incisive criticism. Or even as queer as it could (and maybe should) be, with its sole instance of girl-on-girl being one of shock and power.
But when your film takes place in a store called Free Eden, where its central characters are all named only after fruit (and a pickle) and they play witches, you’d be hard pressed to find any subtext here, even at a discounted rate. And that's not a dig. Such a maximalist canvas is what allows for the film’s larger provocations around kinship to take shape.
You know I don't believe in hierarchy in female relationships.
There’s been a distinct lack of cuntiness in contemporary cinema and television. Look at the way the Heathers reboot was unfairly maligned for fixating on how queer people can and do tear each other to shreds on a regular basis in order to get ahead. That kind of energy is what Forbidden Fruits is willing to bring back and what makes it stand out amidst more current series that feel the need to overcorrect their past selves. Having fun being mean is bad now, I guess.
Luckily the women of Forbidden Fruits so deliciously monstrous to each other, while also occasionally giving a glimpse into just how sincerely kind they could be if not for the fact that they have to adhere to the rules set before them by their queen bee.
It's frankly a delight to watch all of these actresses trading barbs while accompanied by a banger of a soundtrack, or stringing together nonsense words to conjure the devil or whatever. It’s all kind of stupid, and the witchcraft itself is kind of ancillary and potentially pointless, but that’s exactly why it works: The real power exists within the girls themselves.
If Forbidden Fruits has a thesis, it’s that sisterhood is not inherently safe.
The film rejects the easy narrative of female friendship as redemptive, instead presenting it as something far more complicated—a space where love and harm can coexist, often indistinguishably. And Forbidden Fruits understands something deeply embarrassing about being a woman: sometimes the best and worst thing that ever happened to you is your friends.
8.75/10 ★ A campy, tasty, witchy, bitchy, horny, hexy horror comedy romp.
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