By PAYTON McCARTY-SIMAS
Starring Lili Reinhart, Lola Tung and Victoria Pedretti
Directed by Meredith Alloway
Written by Lily Houghton Meredith Alloway
IFC/Shudder
When we’re first introduced to Pumpkin (Lola Tung), the new-girl lead of Meredith Alloway’s pop-witchy debut feature, FORBIDDEN FRUITS, she’s holding a sample tray of knockoff Auntie Anne’s pretzel bites. Anyone who’s ever been to a mall can practically smell them through the screen: a blast of pure sugar, thick dough and hot grease. This suburban staple is overwhelmingly sweet and full of delicious, comfortingly familiar empty calories. As you get older, it’s likely you can’t eat this kind of high-calorie food court snack anymore; those yummy bombs of gluten and fat sit heavy in your stomach, and their one-note flavor no longer satisfies. But as a tween, they’re heavenly. Arguing about the merits of Auntie Anne’s, then, is a little beside the point. I doubt you could find someone who hates a cinnamon sugar pretzel. Really, you either like ‘em or you don’t. But at one point, I bet you probably did.
FORBIDDEN FRUITS is like that, too. This movie is, in essence, a Y2K mall-stalgic rerun of The Craft and Mean Girls, pure and simple, with dashes of catty confections like Jawbreakers and The Devil Wears Prada thrown in. It’s produced by Jennifer’s Body scribe Diablo Cody, and Alloway has cloned her signature style of wittily ratatat, long-acrylic-nails-on-a-keyboard dialogue with eerie, devotional precision. For younger viewers looking for more of this kind of film (fans of Scream Queens, for example), FORBIDDEN FRUITS will likely be a light, gossipy sugar rush. Older viewers nostalgic for this particular flavor of Teavana tea will almost certainly feel the same way.
On a technical level, this movie is admittedly in need of, like, a major makeover. Unlike the glittery Claire ’s-a-like charm bracelets its protagonists take as their talismans, FORBIDDEN FRUITS certainly isn’t pretty to look at, even on the unabashedly kitschy terms it openly embraces. While the props and costumes shine like the rhinestones the characters drop like acid, the shooting style is bizarrely perfunctory for such a surface-loving genre. The color grading is the same grey sludge that’s vexed audiences for years, a fact made more actively infuriating by the lovingly pastel teen-girl source material being drawn upon here.
Its plotting is similarly paper-thin, its twists as obviously, blaringly signposted as the path from Sephora to Forever 21 on a mall directory. YOU ARE HERE: A Free People clone at a mall in Texas. Three young, fabulously dressed women, all named after fruits, run it like a private kingdom, using witchcraft to keep their (fr)enemies in line and their hair looking fabulous. Pumpkin, their latest She’s All That-style project, ingratiates herself with the resident queen bee, Apple (a note-perfectly bitchy Lili Reinhart), only to sew drama in the coven. Spells are cast, Olive Gardens are visited, butterfly clips are traded, gossip and one-liners are hurled – and blood is eventually spilled. On Wednesdays, we secretly fuck guys in sporting goods changing rooms. You get it.
If this stock plot appeals, you’ll have a lot of fun with FORBIDDEN FRUITS. If it doesn’t, skip it. Highlights include Victoria Pedretti as Cherry, the Bubbles to Apple’s Blossom, who brings more soul to her sweet, simple Southern belle with a troubled past than she has to. Alexandra Shipp is game as Fig, the ambitious one who just wants to go to grad school and maybe even text her love interest in words instead of the emojis Apple mandates for all boy-related interaction. The soundtrack is appropriately bitchin’. Most of the jokes land with a pleasantly chummy wink. As a witch movie (a subject I’ve personally spent years investigating), there’s not a lot going on here. “Our magic isn’t some WitchTok ripoff fluffy bunny bullshit,” Cherry tells Pumpkin during her initiation ceremony. It is. But it’s still a pleasure to see women playing in this particular teen-girl-black-comedy garden. As Apple puts it, “Women who don’t have a garden won’t grow. What did that one bitch say? ‘A room of one’s own’?”
See FORBIDDEN FRUITS in limited theaters beginning March 27.
