FORBIDDEN FRUITS – Review by Leslie Combemale
Imagine a decidedly adult comedy horror feature that is equal parts Mean Girls, Heathers, and The Craft, and you’ll have a pretty good sense of what’s in store for audiences when they sit down to watch Forbidden Fruits. The film, which is destined to become this generation’s cult classic, is directed by Meredith Alloway, who partnered on the screenplay with playwright and writer/producer Lily Houghton, as adapted from her play Of the Women. Right from the beginning, that sets it apart from its influences.
Mean Girls, Heathers, and The Craft were all directed by men, whereas the cast and crew of Forbidden Fruits are mostly women, and as such they present their take on performative sisterhood and fashion feminism through a female lens. Don’t look for these filmmakers to pull any punches about just how dangerous women can be, both with and to each other.
A trio of hot, self-declared “empowered”, young twenty-something girls spend their days as queens of retail, extracting $2000 and more from girls and women desperate to fit into one version of today’s idea of femininity. They work at a thinly disguised version of Free People called Free Eden, but at night, they work their magic and declare their sisterly solidarity as a coven.
The high priestess of said coven, or top of the fruit basket if you will, is the mean spirited Apple (Lili Reinhart), who lords it over her fruity minions. There’s the Sabrina Carpenter-esque sex kitten, the last survivor of her family’s house fire Cherry (Victoria Pedretti). She will do anything to belong and be loved. Witchy astrophysics major Fig (Alexandra Shipp) works to balance her individuality with her loyalty to her “sisters”. They embrace mysterious newcomer Pumpkin (Lola Tung), who makes up their “4th corner”, as those who know The Craft would say. Secrets, manipulation, and murder are all inexorably tied to the rituals they perform together.
This movie is just a blast, especially when taken as the wanna-be cult classic it will no doubt become. The script is loaded with quotable moments delivered by characters faking an it-girl confidence they want to see in themselves. Though for some it might grate, the trying too hard vibe is intentional, and perfectly in line with the performative, often damaging pseudo-support seen on social media IRL, between girls and women trying to make their mark.
While the sisterhood represented in Forbidden Fruits is, at best questionable and at worst deadly, there’s a real sisterhood at play below the line for this film. Music supervisor Mikaila Simmons brings together a soundtrack that harkens back to the one so beloved in The Craft, though updated to express a 2020s angry girl aesthetic. Who knew there were so many performers that could be described as “A curse-ier Sabrina Carpenter filled with female rage”? You’ll hear a lot of them during the course of Forbidden Fruits. Ciara Vernon’s production design and Sarah Millman’s costume work co-conspire to serve a sort of super witchy mallcore, which seems counterintuitive, but in this case works and makes the film visually memorable.
Forbidden Fruits is a film that will have a lot of female heads nodding, regardless of age. We’ve all either known, been, or avoided mean girls. Gratefully, they, in large part, weren’t actual witches. In fact, real wicca’s first tenet is “an it harm none”, so the witches of Forbidden Fruits are definitely, (and intentionally) doing wicca wrong. As violent and serious as the movie can get in parts, it’s still less cautionary tale and more entertaining hoot. Whether it succeeds at the box office or not, mark my words. It WILL live on as a cult-y pulp-y favorite.
