What becomes quickly apparent when diving into Izabel Pakzad’s directorial debut Find Your Friends is that by basically every metric you might generally judge a film by… it’s not very good. The writing is ham-fisted, the performances are roundly poor, the visual style is uninteresting and flat, and there’s little to nothing in the way of either character definition or development. Still, this is not necessarily in and of itself a problem: it’s about as conservative a view of film as one can take that any of these things are the be-all and end-all of what makes a film worthwhile, and, particularly in the world of Shudder exclusives, you’re working with a different set of rules. More appropriate questions, then, might be: Is it inventive within its genre constraints? Does it have anything to say? Does it swing big? Find Your Friends does its best to invite viewers to answer yes to these questions, but ultimately can’t escape its own fundamental sloppiness.
The film follows a group of early twenty-something women (including Euphoria’s Chloe Cherry and Disney Channel alumni Bella Thorne) who, after a disastrous boat party during which the group’s most sensitive member, and our protagonist, Amber (Helena Howard), is sexually assaulted, set off toward Joshua Tree for a weekend of drugs, booze, and sex. As Amber’s trauma becomes more and more pronounced and the locals increasingly take issue with the women’s presence, things begin to spin out of control in increasingly violent fashion.
It’s not just the fact that Find Your Friends is about college kids partying that it begins on nodding terms with Spring Breakers. Rather, it’s the film’s wilfully clichéd take on youth, less remembered (though the film is very loosely based on Pakzad’s own college experiences) and more an accumulation of the broadest cultural images of what them youths might be up to. What it doesn’t have in common with Konrine’s film, however, is any sense of specificity. Where that film dove into the brostep neon of the early 2010s, here their world is unidentifiable, their culture and conversation seeming to have been boiled down to the gist of every lazily written horror film’s friend group ever. That is, in many ways, the root of the film’s problems. What the girls roam is a labyrinth of cliché, with every conversation, every moment of tension or joy colored by the sense you’ve seen it a thousand times in near identical fashion, but written and performed elsewhere with more energy and wit.
Now, were the film to lean into this with a spirit of play and parody, things may well have worked. Its characters are gratingly written and lazily played enough that you could find a critique of the contempt male horror writers have for their sexually liberated characters, if you got the shovel out and really went looking. Pakzad has spoken of wanting to skewer tropes of the virginal final girl, and within the film’s final third this is indeed subverted, though in ultimately unimaginative fashion. These are by no means new critiques, as Scream had popularized many of them before most in this cast were even born, but there’s real meat to any study in the way horror has shifted in the three decades since, meat that Find Your Friends never really tears into.
The issue is that having the pronounced feeling of swinging for satire, the film simultaneously tries to dive headlong into severity in a way that it simply cannot balance. As Pakzad continues to push into attempting a serious look at trauma and sexual violence, everything is mired by the fact that the building blocks of the film are not up to the challenge. It’s fundamentally too daft, too contrived, too hackneyed in its presentation of just about everything it puts to screen that even its darkest moments look parodic. Every time something horrible happens, it’s undercut by a terrible line or a gormless visual choice, and the unfortunate overall impression is akin to someone trying to tell you their mom is dying as their pants keep falling down.
DIRECTOR: Izabel Pakzad; CAST: Helena Howard, Bella Thorne, Chloe Cherry, Zion Moreno, Sophia Ali; DISTRIBUTOR: Shudder; STREAMING: June 12; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 33 min.
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