[Movie Review] Izabel Pakzad’s “Find Your Friends” Debuts on Shudder

The revenge film is back, baby! Aleshea Harris’s Is God Is just released to wide critical acclaim; Jafar Panahi’s clandestine political thriller It Was Just an Accident won the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival; Sam Freeman and Ng Choon Ping’s Femme made waves the year before that. So it makes sense that Izabel Pakzad’s directorial debut would look to add some flavor to the trend, taking the tried and true formula and swapping the isolated protagonist for a tight-knit crew of girlfriends, a la Spring Breakers or Assassination Nation.

Or—does she?

The film stars Helena Howard as Amber on a girls’ trip to Joshua Tree for a carefree weekend of sex, drugs, and EDM. Amber is surrounded by her ride-or-dies Zosia (Zión Moreno), Maddy (Sophia Taylor Ali), Lavinia (Bella Thorne), and Lola (Chloe Cherry), which is good news—because while Amber is hoping the weekend will be a chance to let off steam and reset, some unresolved relationship troubles will soon bubble up and require the strong support network she’s built around her to keep her steady. When that network’s mettle is tested early, however, it crumbles.

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When Amber gets the group kicked off the yacht party that opens their weekend, feelings of resentment are apparent from the start. Though she silently pleads for her friends to understand her actions, Amber stays mum when prodded for details. This is only the first sign of friction within the group. These are five seemingly inseparable friends but Amber appears to be shocked that they won’t trust her blindly. The truth may be too unbearable for her to articulate, but she makes little effort to insist to her friends that she has legitimate reasons for her standoffishness. As her episodes continue to derail their bender, her friends become less and less willing to believe the red flags that only she has seen.

Find Your Friends (2026), image via IFC Films.

It’s at once the most believable and unbelievable part of the film—everyone has had at least one friend (especially in the formative college years) who was unwilling to accept any inconvenience to their own pleasure—Amber just so happens to have four of them. The way that it’s structured, however, exposes the internalized misogyny at work. Horror has a long history of presenting men who refuse to believe women, a theme that is backed by evidence across fields and industries. Find Your Friends simply extends the disbelief to women, as well. While Amber should feel safe enough with her friends to explain what she’s feeling and why, their reactions reveal why she doesn’t. It’s the sharpest point the movie makes, underscored by convincing performances by the entire cast, each line of dialogue tinged with a frustration that has been festering for some time, only surfacing now.

Sharp as that point is, though, it does get lost in the noise as the film takes its time shifting from the drawn out party atmosphere of the first act to the retributive third. The movie is extremely tail-heavy—relying on the gruesome final minutes to pull it all together in a way that feels unearned. The resolution of the women’s terror does little to close the issues that plague them well before they arrive in Joshua Tree. So much of the film is spent building up the conflict between the women themselves that it overshadows the eventual exacting of revenge on the men tormenting them. The buzzy, punctuative climax is cathartic, but ultimately serves to exaggerate the fact that none of Amber’s concerns are addressed by her friends.

Find Your Friends is a thrilling, if at times frustrating, debut for Pakzad. So much can be said about the dynamics at work within Amber’s clique that it feels a bit empty to see them go unsaid. Thorne and Cherry, specifically, have spoken about wanting the film to engage young men with its commentary about consent and rape culture. It’s a lofty goal but I’m not convinced that it drives hard enough to break through the “manosphere” influence it hopes to disrupt. If five decades of rape-revenge films haven’t been able to turn the tide on rape culture, it’s hard to see Find Your Friends as being the straw that breaks the misogynistic camel’s back.

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Article by Ande Thomas

Ande loves the intersection of sci-fi and horror, where our understanding of the natural world clashes with our fear of the new and unknown. He is an independent member of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and a supporting member of the Horror Writers Association. He writes about monsters and foreign horror and can also be found over on Letterboxd.

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