I’m tempted to retitle Find Your Friends (now on Shudder) Bad Decisions: The Movie. Maybe that’s not fair, considering the premise situates five young college-age women within a predatory world that far too often sees them as prey — but it’s tough to defend the manner with which they throw caution to the wind. The directorial debut of Izabel Pakzad ends up playing as a party-girl cautionary tale of sorts, but whether it functions as anything thematically or tonally coherent is the primary issue here.
FIND YOUR FRIENDS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: It’s a Spring Breakers scene right off the bat: A yacht party with loud techno bumpin’, lotsa drugs and booze, scantily clad young women, and male gazes everywhere. Everyone’s horny, of course. Hornier than one of those goats with four gigantic horns. Shaking their thangs and talking crass about dat ass are Amber (Helena Howard), Lavinia (Bella Thorne), Zosia (Zion Moreno), Lola (Chloe Cherry, Euphoria) and Maddy (Sophia Ali). They’re college pals on an anything-goes vacation where the goal seems to be female bonding, alcohol poisoning and getting some wang, all in the most devil-may-care manner possible, and calling it “an adventure.” “A toast to the hos with the most!” Lola bellows before the latest of lord-knows-how-many rounds of shots, which pretty much sums up the intellectual content of this endeavor.
We follow Amber’s POV for much of the film, and an incident with a guy rumored to have a big ’un sets an ominous tone for what’s to come. To make her ex jealous, Amber locks lips with him. He wants to go further. She doesn’t. She escapes the situation, liquors up even harder and smashes a glass punchbowl over his head, turning him into a bloody mess. The five ladies exit the party, exchanging insults with the hosts like nine-year-olds butting heads over a gaga ball point. They head out to Joshua Tree, where they pull their big expensive-ass Jeep up to a big expensive-ass AirBnB and christen it: “This is a house to get fuuuuuckeddddd uppppp in!” hoots Lavinia. If there’s a Pee-Wee’s Playhouse-style word of the day, it’s “Wooooooooooooo!” And all the noise pisses off the itchy neighbor (Chris Bauer), who isn’t nice about asking them to turn down the EDM, or about their apparent status as rich kids stomping around the Normal Folks’ town.
But Amber isn’t quite right after that incident. No doubt, it was sexual assault. And her friends waver between victim-blaming (“You were all over that guy!”) and being supportive in a superficial, nonspecific way. And by “being supportive,” I mean, “they just take a shitload of molly.” And she washes it down with copious amounts of booze. They head to a warehouse party hosted by a rock-star DJ who beelines for Amber. He seems sincere at first, maybe an antidote to the yacht creep, but no. Men in this movie are all pukes and cretins. That doesn’t stop Lola and Amber from accepting cocaine from the pukiest, most cretinous-looking crew of cretinous pukes at the party, then naively not thinking they need to do anything in return. The ensuing ordeal(s) end up testing the tensile strength of these five besties’ friendships, which may not be so strong after all. Me, I’m thinking Amber should’ve found some better friends.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Find Your Friends skims the surface of Spring Breakers, Death Proof and Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge for style and theme, and calls it a day.
Performance Worth Watching: Howard does her damnedest to render Amber with the nuance and complexity an aimless and deserves
Sex And Skin: Lots of skimpy clothes and one particularly graphic scene that’s the absolute polar opposite of sexy.
Our Take: Find Your Friends is thematically reductive enough to make Nancy Reagan’s dim “Just Say No” campaign seem like a rigorous philosophical treatise. Its attempt to depict the psychological fallout of sexual assault on the young-adult mind is noble, but ultimately lost in the simplistic sensationalism of Pakzad’s screenplay. These characters are frustratingly one-dimensional. The core women bulbs of the dimmest type, the men either braying, hungry wolves or get-off-my-lawn types (many also have guns, of course), both playing heavily into the stereotypes of a socioeconomic divide lurking beneath the surface. Amber and her friends make decisions rendering themselves so cluelessly vulnerable, their inability to assess danger — even the screamingly obvious, sirens-blaring, neon-arrows-pointing kind they face in this movie — defies the commonest of common sense.
Parts of the film are ultrarealistic, bracing in their intensity. Other parts are elevated, flirting with the pulpy fodder of direct-to-VHS revenge flicks. The former points Find Your Friends toward a story about the struggle for female agency in a hostile world, but the latter undermines it with darkly shocking quasi-thrills. Amber and her friends rarely do or say anything of substance. They either squabble like tweens who’ve watched too much Euphoria or whoop it up with vacuous glee, coming off like wafer-thin facsimiles of Mean Girls archetypes. During one of the film’s most introspective moments, Maddy manages to muster up a bon mot that’s representative of the disorientingly vapid inner lives of these characters: “Why not just treat every day like a vacay?” You’ll want to grab these people by their lapels and shout, “STOP BEING SO UNSMART!” in their faces, assuming they’d ever wear anything without spaghetti straps, of course.
Stirred into the pot are depictions of substance abuse and the fallout from trauma, within the context of these characters’ misguided notions of you-go-girl empowerment. But the substance of these depictions is sorely lacking. These five women are such a deeply flawed unit, it can be hard to empathize with their pain; that’s what happens when their dysfunction seems to be engineered to telegraph the plot’s twists and turns. After a third-act scene of gruesome mutilation, Pakzad directs the story toward grim hopelessness, rendering it a primal scream into an abyss. If we understood who these women truly are, we might’ve even heard it.
Our Call: Find Your Friends is ultimately just lost. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
