After being compared to iconic films like “Mean Girls” and “The Craft,” watching “Forbidden Fruits” was quite the letdown. The witchy, satirical film is something that should’ve been made for a viewer like me, but in every way felt flat. “Forbidden Fruits” isn’t the cult classic I thought it’d be. Instead, it attempts to cover the lack of effective comedy or horror with a campy aesthetic and nostalgia bait.
In “Forbidden Fruits,” there is a witchy coven run in the dressing room of a ridiculously expensive clothing store, Free Eden. The saleswomen of Free Eden are powerful and revered by the other mall employees. Apple (Lili Reinhart) runs a tight ship in her store, leaving Cherry (Victoria Pedretti) and Fig (Alexandra Shipp) to follow behind. The girls are each other’s sisterhood, until Pumpkin (Lola Tung) begins working with them, disrupting their dynamics and getting to the center of their girlboss magic.
Billed as both a horror and comedy, I’m not sure “Forbidden Fruits” ever fully achieved either. Not to say there isn’t comedy in the film, but it starts over-saturated at the beginning and fades as the film progresses. Everyone in the cast plays their role very straight, leaving their delivery of these jokes feeling subdued. While the more deadpan delivery adds a layer of earnestness to the film’s plot, it strips away the key point of a comedy, which is to be funny.
The satire that “Forbidden Fruits” is built on doesn’t come across as biting as Pedretti suggests in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. She calls the film a “Trojan horse” for issues the film touches on such as consumerism, grief and abusive relationships. While Cherry has one of the more interesting arcs, the social commentary she describes feels far from fleshed-out within the film. Of the plot threads that explore those topics, none were complete enough to produce meaningful commentary beyond the context of the film.
Clearly, the girls in the coven are written to challenge stereotypes, yet in many places it’s hard to pinpoint which stereotype the film is intending to deconstruct. The aesthetics behind the coven range from boho to gothic to shabby chic. Their personalities feel indecisive, folding to achieve the narrative’s goal rather than work with it. It’s hard to build a compelling story arc around characters’ growth when there’s no clear starting point.
The same can be said about the coven’s powers. Throughout the film, the characters go in and out of believing in their magic, their trust in the coven waivers constantly and the spells are either all-powerful or completely useless. There’s a lack of cohesion that makes it feel narratively unsatisfying, even when it’s clearly supposed to mean something to the members of the coven.
After nearly an entire film of only alluding to the coven’s violence, there was a tone shift in the final act, and suddenly it felt scary. Although that’s what I was wishing for the whole movie, without a proper build-up, it just felt gratuitous. Developed characters were killed purely for shock value. The culmination of the different characters’ storylines during the final sequence left so many of my questions unanswered.
The only part of the film that completely made sense was setting the story in a mall. Given the unfortunate, slow death of mall culture, I found this delightfully campy and narratively satisfying. As much as I love the mall, it makes sense for these girls to cling to this dying community in the same way they would do anything to keep their sisterhood. When the film is establishing the coven’s place at the top of the hierarchy, the story is at its most intriguing, finding that “Mean Girls” and “The Craft” crossover that I anticipated.
As much as “Forbidden Fruits” benefits from the mall camp aesthetic, a film requires more than nostalgia bait to be captivating. The comparisons to cult-classic films may draw audiences in, but the lack of substance in the film proves the similarities to be shallow. I really wish this film had dug deeper into the themes it attempted to satirize. Maybe then it would’ve been able to be in conversation with its inspiration. Missing that depth leaves the audience without any meaningful commentary or even a laugh.
*This column was updated April 8, 2026.
