Want to know what goes together like two peas in a pod? Sisterhood and witchcraft. We have seen it in films like The Craft, Practical Magic, Suspiria , and The Witches of Eastwick . But what if you take that exploration and combine it with the satire seen in Mean Girls and Jennifer’s Body ? That potion, brewed by Meredith Alloway in her directorial debut, is Forbidden Fruit s. A dark satire about what it means to be a girl’s girl.
Free Eden employee Apple (Lili Reinhart, Riverdale ) secretly runs an after-hours witchy femme cult in the mall’s basement. She is joined by her fellow Fruits, Cherry (Victoria Pedretti, The Haunting of Hill House ) and Fig (Alexandra Shipp, Straight Outta Compton ). But when the new hire Pumpkin (Lola Tung, The Summer I Turned Pretty ) challenges their performative sisterhood, the women are forced to face their own poisons or succumb to a bloody fate.
There is a lot to admire about Forbidden Fruits . The costume designs are bright and colourful. The ensemble cast is perfectly in-tune with the film’s sharp satirical outlook on the messy and complicated friendships between women. On paper, Alloway has all of the right ingredients for a biting dark horror-comedy. But in practice, it never quite lands. Instead, it keeps circling the familiar tropes that we have seen countless of times before.
When you get right down to it, Forbidden Fruits is a mash-up of The Craft and Mean Girls . However, unlike The Craft , The Fruits are not actually witches. They have appropriated the aesthetics and performance of witchcraft to create a toxic hierarchy. And when the tension between the Fruits begins to simmer and spill over—as the group dynamic begins to fracture from their own toxicity, like in Mean Girls— the film rushes it, cramming the real chaos into the final fifteen minutes. This late scramble ends up being more frustrating than satisfying.
The disconnect in the storytelling seems to primarily come from a fear of being mean. The Fruits constantly insist on their closeness, their loyalty, and their love for one another. But the second things get uncomfortable, they default to gossip, manipulation, and rule-breaking (even their own arbitrary ones like communicating only through emojis). There is a genuinely rich idea here about the competitiveness, the insecurities, and the toxic femininity that festers in tight-knit friendships. However, the film keeps pulling its punches, even when the final act is full of hair-pulling, screaming and nails being ripped off. For a film that wants to be savage, Forbidden Fruits plays it too safe.
That said, Forbidden Fruits is still a pretty entertaining ride. When it leans into its sense of humour, it becomes a genuinely sharp, rapid-fire satire of wit and absurdity — the kind that made Mean Girls so special. And when it finally commits to being nasty, it absolutely delivers it in a glorious bloodbath. The finale alone suggests this crowd-pleaser could become a cult classic, in the vein of its cinematic influences . Though the film plays it safe, there is enough style, humour, and late-game chaos to give it a second life.
Forbidden Fruits comes to theatres on March 27.
