Sisterhood Gets Sinister In Campy Mall Horror

The mall can be a bleak, desolate place. Endless corridors lit by fluorescent lights, the hot sun peering through glass ceilings. Stores that feel more like fake shopfronts in an amusement park than actual retailers. Food courts filled with restaurants you’ve never heard of. Forbidden Fruits traps us in one of these hellscapes with four young women – each of them named after a fruit – and through their jobs on the sales floor, they form a sisterhood that is more cult than feminist utopia.

Within the first five minutes, director Meredith Alloway, who co-wrote her feature directorial debut with Lily Houghton, lets us know exactly what we’re in for. Apple (Lili Reinhart, in a role she was born to play), donning a velvety red wig, sits in her car in the Texas sun before her shift, the man in the truck next to her masturbating while making eye contact. Before he can finish, Apple throws her hot latte out of her Stanley Cup and through the man’s window into his lap, strutting into the mall through some big box department store like Dillard’s on her way to Free Eden.

There, she works with Fig (Alexandra Shipp) and Cherry (Victoria Pedretti). The Free Eden girls are mall royalty, hitting the food court, where they have a standing claim on the best table surrounded by lush plastic fauna, to pick up their already prepared salads. It’s the kind of intro that would feel at home in any early 2000s teen movie, but Alloway, Houghton, and producer Diablo Cody infuse Forbidden Fruits with a kind of cynicism befitting of the 2020s. The film looks at these women’s version of feminism and friendship through a spiritual-capitalist lens that, though sometimes shallow, is as delicious to sink your teeth into as a juicy, ripe pear.

Forbidden Fruits Perfectly Blends Early Aughts Teen Comedy With 2020s Nihilism

We enter the alien world of Free Eden through the eyes of new girl Pumpkin (Lola Tung, fresh off The Summer I Turned Pretty‘s final season), a pretzel shop employee who is seemingly desperate to join Apple’s girl gang. She eventually worms her way in, allowing the archetypes at play to take shape, with each character slotting into classic girl group roles: the doe-eyed newcomer (Pumpkin); the ditzy and pliable innocent (Cherry); the jaded intellect (Fig); and, finally, the Head Bitch in Charge (Apple).

Forbidden Fruits isn’t afraid to reference, nor is it afraid to want to be referenced. Though it owes a great deal of debt to Heathers and its ilk, the film also knows who is going to be watching it, and who these characters are supposed to be today. They reference The Devil Wears Prada with breathless reverence, complain about their shoddy stick-and-poke tattoos (“I think anybody with a heart tattooed on their body is deeply alone,” opines Pumpkin), and have FOMO over not being part of the Dead Dads Club.

Tung is key to the film’s tone here. As the new girl, Pumpkin should be enraptured by these girls who have taken her in, but once she’s been accepted into the circle (by confessing her sins to Marilyn Monroe in a dressing room mirror), it’s clear there’s some deeper motive at play here. She is too inquisitive to be swept up in Apple’s game; too manipulative to fall for Cherry’s doe-eyed act. As Apple’s manipulation tactics become more apparent and confirm Pumpkin’s suspicions about the goings-on at Free Eden, Forbidden Fruits sheds its girl-power bona fides to reveal something a bit more evil.

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.

Spirituality by way of capitalism, prayer based on the “retail season cycle,” toxic control under the guise of having each other’s backs – it’s all fodder for Apple’s sick games, and instantly recognizable as the sort of performative friendship that has become pervasive in the social media age. Her tactics previously resulted in the exile of a former Free Eden employee named Pickle (Emma Chamberlain), whose presence begins to unravel the mystery at the center of the film. The co-dependent girls may be reaching for some greater purpose in their spell-casting sessions, which take place in the center of Free Eden’s changing room, but it becomes increasingly clear that the nirvana they are searching for is hollow.

Fig, Cherry, and even Pumpkin to an extent, don’t know what they’re searching for, and Apple, possibly the smartest of the bunch, knows that. The sisterhood, the rituals, and the very act they put on with customers are all a façade. They’re play-acting in one of the biggest American playgrounds. The idea of the mall as it was once known may be dying, but it’s not going down without a fight. A girl like Apple isn’t going to let it, not when they can use this sort of hierarchy to enact a twisted game of control.

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. That’s not to say cynicism wasn’t present in the great teen films of the past, but there was a sheen of hope that Forbidden Fruits‘ more nihilistic ethos eschews.

Amid the endlessly quotable dialogue, mall fashion moments, and sheer ridiculousness of the film’s bloody climax, Forbidden Fruits is more of a good time than an incisive portrait of its thematic concerns. Nuance has no home here. Instead, this illegitimate child of Mean Girls and The Craft is all blunt force trauma, wearing its influences on its sleeve and letting loose sharp-tongued barbs that are as biting as they are funny. It’s a welcome return to the kind of never-quite-good-girl-gone-bad cinema that feels so sorely missing from today.

Forbidden Fruits hits theaters Friday, March 27.