Five vacationing young women come into the sights of dangerous local men in Izabel Pakzad’s frustrating Find Your Friends, now on Shudder.
TW Sexual assault
Find Your Friends should be a good-for-her affront-revenge film (which I totally go for), and it feels like writer-director Izabel Pakzad thinks it is, is a frustrating exercise of hair-pulling annoyance at everyone, leading to a climax that should have empowered but is an underwhelming nothing. There’s a clear desire to be something along the lines of Death Proof, but it falls so incredibly short. It’s laughable that a problematic Quentin Tarantino lands so much closer and better.
The story of this empty exercise? Amber joins her friends in a series of empty exercises of getting drunk, doing drugs, and hanging out on a yacht, at a rented house in Joshua Tree, a club, and a house party (with one brief non-party sojourn to a drug-fueled hike). In the first act, on the yacht, a guy nearly rapes her. After she attacks the guy when he moves on to another girl, the group is kicked off the boat. So they head to their desert rental, where she continually runs into the worst guys, leading to more attacks and her friend group’s odd disbelief, leading to a tepid off-and-on cat-and-mouse.
It’s a story that stems from all too many true horror tales. Pakzad wrote Find Your Friends after a truck full of men chased her and her friends down a deserted desert road in the middle of the night. The scene is recreated in the film, and it’s harrowing. There is a truth of terror underneath everything that does not work in the film. What these characters go through is something too many already do, and it’s a shame. I want to be clear, my dislike of Find Your Friends is not in any way discounting what people go through. But this movie is bad. Sorry.
All that would be an interesting watch, seeing how this specific culture deals with murder, violence, and misogyny in their midst and what they do, or don’t do about it. And it has been, in both the excellent Influencer movies, also found on Shudder. The failure of Find Your Friends comes to the characters. Movie characters, even our leads, need not be likable. You don’t need to root for them. But they do need to be interesting and stand out. The core four, outside of lead Amber, played very well with the terrible material by Helena Howard, are essentially interchangeable and utterly painful to watch. Maybe one named cast member, Bella Thorne (the others are Zion Moreno, Chloe Cherry, and Sophia Ali), has a little more. No matter, as the whole group is grating and in no way feels like a friend group. These folks are the absolute worst, exhausting to spend time with. In a film that positions all men as a second away from rape and murder, and the characters seem overall aware of this, how can none of the friend group believe the other woman they call their friend? It stretches any sort of believability. Sure, they’re vapid and empty, caring only for sex, drugs, and liquor, but you mean to tell me none of them have been assaulted before or would have their friends back?
I can’t help but think of Bodies Bodies Bodies, which also looks at toxic friendships, but did so with strong writing that made it work. Here, you’re pulled into their toxicity (and see how their friends, bad friends but friends, up their danger). Here is frustration, but then again, they continually walk themselves blithely into danger. It’s a world where these women are explicitly aware of the danger of the men around (without getting into it, every man in the film is a violent, dangerous, and a second away from sexual assault), but also blissfully keen to wander the darkened desert because they want one more drink. People state horror movie characters make dumb decisions to keep the plot moving, and this is a keen example.
Find Your Friends is just an ugly film. The people I’ve ranted about above, but it’s shot poorly, with oddly framed shots and weird cuts that continue to anger the viewer. Off-center with weird close-ups are maybe meant to replicate Amber’s mindview, but come off as bad choices behind the camera.
There’s a kernel of a decent revenge thriller in Find Your Friends. Within the utter mess of character and storytelling of Izabel Pakzad’s film is a terrible truth of real-life dangers. It’s a shame it’s lost in the remainder of the film. I recommend you don’t find Find Your Friends.