One bad Apple
Forbidden Fruits has three kinds of scenes, and your ability to love this film will depend on how much weight you place on each.
Type one: baffling, inert slices of half-baked character development and awkwardly rendered melodrama: Several stretches stumble through character revelations and plot points, like it’s pumping out backstory and character beats because I guess you gotta. Type two, and the heart of the film, are bantery sketches of acerbic teen comedy with heavily stylized dialogue in the Diablo Cody vein, straddling that razor-thin line between insufferably twee and deliciously arch… much the way Cody’s own writing often does. The third type of scene caught me off guard, because it ends up absolutely dominating the back half of the movie: intensely vivid, frequently gory horror comedy. These three modes are balanced roughly evenly across a film that is shambling and deeply uneven. I was not willing to ride that wave during the first half, but I came around. The climax jolts awake in time for Forbidden Fruits to leave a wicked, tart aftertaste.
The Shudder release’s setting is a Dallas shopping mall, where a group of chic salesgirls working at a clothing store called Free Eden coax thousands of dollars out of customers by day and run a witchy femme cult in the back room by night. At the top of the food chain is queen bee Apple (Lili Reinhart), spaced-out Cherry (Victoria Pedretti), and secretive Fig (Alexandra Shipp). Their toxic-but-tidy sisterhood gets unsettled when a new hire from the food court pretzel kiosk, Pumpkin (Lola Tung), joins the group. Once she’s properly initiated, the foursome’s web of friendships slowly curdles into violence.
The film rests entirely on the four leads, who definitely elevate the material. At the top of the pack is Reinhart, who is absolutely sensational, ratcheting Apple up from sociopath-prom-queen archetype to something riveting and scary. Reinhart has terrific screen command; a long close-up on her face during a violent moment set in the mall fountain late in the film is facial expressiveness acting straight out of great silent films. Her turn is in a long lineage of cinematic mean girls running from Heathers through, well, Mean Girls. (Reinhart continues her rise in my rankings of favorite working actors, as she’s been the best part of practically everything I’ve seen her in.) Pedretti is the most fearless and funny performer here, finding a Cherry who is an airhead but full of bursting emotions; she really hits Cherry’s highs and lows. Tung’s Pumpkin grounds the chaos with the richest arc of the four (innocence to villainy, then subverted). The four bring different approaches but have a tense, synergistic chemistry.
The script, by director Meredith Alloway and Lily Houghton as an adaptation of a play by Houghton, is clearly steeped in Juno and Jennifer’s Body. The Diablo Cody connection goes farther, in fact, as Cody is a producer on the film. And yet Alloway and Houghton are not quite Cody, though their imitation is solid. Maybe I’m just a man in his upper thirties, but the exaggerated register grates a handful of times. The characters flit in and out of cartoon mode, sometimes dumbed down to the point of losing nuance, sometimes leaning into pricklier and more shaded portraiture, and the script can’t quite always decide how exaggerated the story is from minute to minute.
Alloway, in her feature debut, makes a wobbly but ultimately winning impression. You can quickly tell which scenes excited her, because they pop with one visual idea or another: a falling body blurred in the background, a zoomed-in shot of a stuck shoelace, etc. As a storyteller, she captures a deliberate amorality that is a little refreshing in the “elevated horror” era. But the flip side is that the film is quite dull when Alloway is not locked in on the scene; many scenes just flop on by, and even some moments that <i>should</i> leave an impression, like the reveal of Pumpkin’s slinky new look, plod a bit.
Karim Hussain’s cinematography is sharp and edgy when it needs to be, finding a tension between shiny mall glamour and curdling menace, but a fruit-motif horror-comedy that’s this committed to its own bit really should really have more lurid color than this. Pump those reds and greens.
One big win is the choice of setting: the film almost never leaves the central mall. It probably saved the budget some, but centering the film entirely in the one location has some strong storytelling effects: the characters’ undercurrent of feeling isolated despite their closeness matches so well with a shopping mall, all commodification and salesmanship, busy but impersonal.
Forbidden Fruits is messy enough that I understand why it got dropped onto Shudder instead of opening wide, and I’m not sure Alloway has fully figured out how to make a movie yet. But the film has enough bite, cast charisma, and nastiness, not to mention the sheer Reinhart electricity, to make up for the bad type of scenes’ wheel-spinning.
Is It Good?
Good (5/8)
Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.