What do you get when you cross Mean Girls with The Craft? Maybe a dash of Clueless? You get Meredith Alloway’s Forbidden Fruits, and let’s be real, that combination of ingredients is extremely promising. It’s also an incredibly high bar to reach, and while this exploration of sisterhood and covenly pursuits has its comical highlights, what it lacks is the sharp satirical edge to cast a lasting spell.
You can’t knock the cast assembled for Forbidden Fruits; that’s for sure. Lili Reinhart of Riverdale fame plays Apple, the leader of this band of posh mean girls who work out of a Free Eden clothing shop in a mall. There are still malls??? Her fellow fruit-mates include Cherry, played by Victoria Pedretti, and Fig, played by Alexandra Shipp. After hours, they gather in the mall basement and do witchy things, but they aren’t actually witches. They’re more of a toxic cult of frenemies, with Apple pulling all of the strings. They judge people, they hate on others, and Heaven forbid you work at the nearby pretzel shop because it’s on the lowest tier of the mall totem pole, don’tcha know?
Enter Lola Tung as Pumpkin, one of those pretzel shop employees, who manages to win over the girls and enter their little coven. But Pumpkin isn’t like the others. She doesn’t quite subscribe to all of these performative expressions of female bonding, and her constant challenging of Apple’s authority forces them all to face their own problems, and discover who is really tearing them apart.
What’s frustrating about Forbidden Fruits is how close it is to being great, and a sure-fire cult classic. All four women are perectly in sync with the silliness of the premise, poking fun at shopping mall etiquette, fashion faux pas, and messiness of female friendships.The costume design is vibrant, and way too chic for a guy like me to understand other than it’s pleasing to the eye. The Fruits are fairweather friends, to put it bluntly. They love and support one another when it’s easy, but as soon as things go south, the backstabbing, lying, and sabotaging of one another begins. The film works best when it can be tongue-in-cheek while exploring the turbulent waters of sisterhood. Society puts a lot of pressure on women that can lead to insecurities, which makes being a true friend hard, even for those who claim to be part of the same coven.
Unfortunately, the film pulls its punches throughout, saving the really nasty stuff for the last 10 minutes or so. That’s when you realize why Shudder would have anything to do with Forbidden Fruits. Remember all of those warnings by your parents to make sure your shoes are tied when on the escalator? When the literal storm hits, and the nail-ripping, hair-pulling, glass shattering action begins, it’s too late to save what has been a disappointing dark comedy that doesn’t quite live up to its potential.
Forbidden Fruits opens on March 27th.
