Synopsis: A mall clothing store employee runs an after-hours coven with her co-workers, but the arrival of a new hire threatens to expose the toxic foundations of their performative sisterhood.
Stars: Lili Reinhart, Lola Tung, Victoria Pedretti, Alexandra Shipp, Emma Chamberlain, Gabrielle Union
Director: Meredith Alloway
Rated: R
Running Length: 103 minutes
Movie Review in Brief: Forbidden Fruits doesn’t all work, but when it does, it’s absolute dynamite. Lili Reinhart owns every frame, the visuals are gorgeous, and the ensemble is having enough fun to carry you through the rough patches. Think Heathers meets The Craft, set in a dying mall.
Review:
Every generation gets the teen queen horror movie it deserves. The ’80s had Heathers. The late ’90s had Jawbreaker. The 2000s had Mean Girls (and Jennifer’s Body, which took a decade to find its people). Forbidden Fruits is the 2026 entry, and while it doesn’t land with the precision of those first two, it swings with enough venom and style to earn its spot in the conversation. Fair warning: the movie takes a minute to find its footing. Stick with it anyway.
Welcome to Free Eden (Employees Must Wash Their Sins)
Inside mall clothing store Free Eden, Apple (Lili Reinhart, Chemical Hearts) runs a tight ship. She and her co-workers Cherry (Victoria Pedretti, The Haunting of Hill House) and Fig (Alexandra Shipp, Barbie) aren’t just selling overpriced boho fashion. After hours, they retreat to the dressing rooms for rituals, confessions, and a makeshift coven built from stolen candles and a desperate longing for connection. When a pretzel shop employee named Pumpkin (Lola Tung) earns an invite into the circle, her presence starts pulling threads that Apple would rather keep knotted.
Reinhart Is Running This Register
A lot of this movie doesn’t work. Let me just say that up front. The first act stumbles through tone-setting that feels uncertain of what it wants to be, the gore in the final stretch arrives with more enthusiasm than justification, and some of the dialogue plays like a social media feed given a screenplay credit.
But Reinhart is so diabolically good as Apple that she drags the whole operation into watchability through sheer force of personality. She has line deliveries that can freeze you and others that made me howl. Every single one is calibrated with a specificity that suggests she understood this character at a molecular level long before cameras rolled. If you’ve only known her from Riverdale, prepare to recalibrate.
Pedretti is dementedly fun as Cherry, the loyal second-in-command whose devotion to Apple borders on religious. Shipp finally gets room to show off a comedic range that her previous roles have kept bottled up, and she takes full advantage. Tung operates at a lower frequency than her co-stars, but the role demands it. Someone has to keep this movie tethered to something resembling reality, and she handles that responsibility with more subtlety than the screenplay always affords her.
Don’t come to a screening of Forbidden Fruits for Gabrielle Union or Emma Chamberlain (making her acting debut as a former Free Eden employee called Pickle) alone; both are used sparingly but effectively in roles that serve the story’s structure more than their talents.
A Parking Lot Garden That Actually Blooms
First-time feature director Meredith Alloway co-wrote the screenplay with Lily Houghton, adapting Houghton’s stage play, and the transition from stage to screen has clearly supercharged the material. Cinematographer Karim Hussain shot the film on the Arri Alexa 35 with vintage Canon K35 lenses, and his personal 1970s zoom lens (which, according to the production notes, came complete with internal fungus that creates a distinctive glow) gives the whole production a dreamy, textured patina that feels both nostalgic and unsettling.
Production designer Ciara Vernon built the Free Eden store inside a working Toronto mall, shooting almost entirely overnight, which lends an authentic after-hours, Dawn of the Dead-esque eeriness to every frame. Costume designer Sarah Millman reached out to over 100 designers and secured actual Rodarte pieces for the film’s most ceremonial sequences, a flex that pays off visually in ways the budget probably shouldn’t have allowed. The fashion in Forbidden Fruits isn’t just window dressing. It’s worldbuilding, and it’s spectacular.
Not All the Fruit Is Ripe
The comparisons to Mean Girls are inevitable and not entirely unfair, though at its sharpest, Forbidden Fruits channels the darker, more corrosive energy of Heathers. At its weakest, it drifts into Jawbreaker territory, all attitude without enough follow-through. The film grows more feverish as it races toward its blood-soaked finale, and whether the escalation (literally, it turns out) works for you will depend largely on how much goodwill the four leads have banked.
For me, they banked enough. Reinhart, Pedretti, Shipp, and Tung make the whole messy, ambitious thing easy to forgive. Reinhart’s performance alone is worth skipping the employee discount and paying full price.
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