Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Meredith Alloway
Starring: Lili Reinhart, Lola Tung, Victoria Pedretti, Alexandra Shipp, Emma Chamberlain, Gabrielle Union
Are there any scarier people than the staff at exclusive boutique fashion stores? Whether they're dismissively ignoring you or looking down their beautiful noses as if you're something they scraped off their Louboutins, they create a sinister vibe that makes you either want to turn and leave or buy the first item they recommend just to be done with the harrowing experience.
With Forbidden Fruits, director Meredith Alloway and co-writer Lily Houghton (the latter adapting her stage play 'Of the woman came the beginning of sin, and through her we all die') tap into this dynamic. Their movie follows Twin Peaks, Peter Strickland's In Fabric and László Nemes' Sunset in suggesting that a women's clothing store might be a front for something nefarious.
In this case it's a coven of young witches operating out of Free Eden, a boutique in a Dallas mall. Forbidden Fruits is what you might get if Mean Girls and The Craft had a baby. It has the glossy setting and bitchy crew of the former and the witchery of the latter. Like both of those movies, it sees a young woman initiated into a very specific clique of women who are simultaneously aspirational and outsiders (of course, all of these stories have their roots in Jane Austen's 'Emma').
That would be Pumpkin (Lola Tung), who has befriended Free Eden employee Fig (Alexandra Shipp) and hopes to ditch her job at a pretzel stand for a role at Free Eden. Fig introduces Pumpkin to Free Eden's queen bee Apple (Lili Reinhardt), who sees enough potential in Pumpkin to invite her into her fold, which also includes ditzy reformed alcoholic Cherry (Victoria Pedretti).
Pumpkin is oddly cool with the initiation ritual that involves drinking her new co-workers' menstrual blood and worshipping the spirit of Marilyn Monroe (in a clever touch, the store's changing room doubles as a confessional in which the girls confess their sins to the Some Like it Hot star). What the Free Eden girls don't know is that Pumpkin has an ulterior motive for joining their coven.
The most interesting aspect of Forbidden Fruits is how it ditches the expected "slay queen" pseudo-feminism in favour of a more nuanced look at what feminism means to Gen-Z. It highlights how today's youth have dressed up puritanical beliefs in progressive clothing, as scornful and prudish when it comes to sex as their grandparents. The controlling Apple dissuades the girls under her control from consorting with any male figures, but there is no hint of lesbianism, simply abstinence. The bracelets she makes them wear might as well be purity rings. Fig and Cherry are both secretly defying Apple's commandment, something Pumpkin intends to exploit.
As a horror-comedy however, Forbidden Fruits never quite blends those two flavours into a satisfying smoothie. It holds back on revealing whether anything supernatural is at play for so long that it doesn't really function as a horror movie, more a rather straightforward mystery, one that often leaves the audience confused as to just what is being investigated here. It's not until the climax that we finally get some bloodshed, and to its credit it is surprisingly gruesome when it arrives.
As a comedy it lacks the level of wit required to place it alongside the likes of Clueless and Mean Girls. The central cast all step up to the plate and deliver what few zingers they get with aplomb, with Pedretti the standout as a bimbo with a vicious streak. Reinhardt nails the catty indifference of the sort of young women who staff such snooty stores, but Apple is an unremarkable antagonist who never poses the necessary level of threat to Pumpkin. The dialogue is never sharp enough, and Forbidden Fruits often plays like an unproduced Diablo Cody script, all outdated references that betray the screenwriter's cultural distance from the younger generation they're portraying. Though the movie is set in the present it's very much in tune with an era that is practically dead and gone - is the mall really the centre of a young woman's world in 2026?
Forbidden Fruits is on UK/ROI VOD from July 5th.
