Find Your Friends review
Find your friends…and tell them to skip this movie.
New movie reviews will not contain spoilers.
Find Your Friends
Directed by Izabel Pakzad
Written by Izabel Pakzad
Starring Helena Howard, Bella Thorne, Zion Moreno, Chole Cherry, Sophia Ali, Chris Bauer, Jake Manley and Blane Kern III
Find Your Friends Review
Shudder has been cranking exclusives/originals out at a healthier pace lately. It’s something we’ve been hoping about for a while now. Find Your Friends is here to remind us to be careful what you wish for. While having more original content isn’t a bad thing…Find Your Friends is a bad movie. If you decide to stick around for the bulk of this review I’ll get into why…but that’s pretty much all you need to know about it.
Amber (Helena Howard) and four friends (Bella Thorne, Chloe Cherry, Zion Moerno and Sophia Ali) love to party. In fac, that seems to be all they do. Aside from Amber…there doesn’t appear to be a solitary thought about anything else among them. These characters are as one note as you could possibly make them. They drink, do drugs, dance, talk about having sex…and repeat. Amber seems to be growing tired of the routine. She’s fully jolted out of it by a sexual assault aboard a party boat early in Find Your Friends. From there…things go off the rails.
Amber is upset with her friends for leaving her alone. She doesn’t tell them that she had to kick the random guy she left with off of her after saying no. From their perspective…they aren’t sure what they were supposed to do. Leave with her and the guy she was making out with? It gets more muddled when she breaks a glass bowl over the guy’s head while he chats up another girl. Her friends do stand by her after that, by the way. As if things couldn’t get more muddled…Amber later publicly accuses another guy of assaulting her. This time…he didn’t do anything…and an entire room full of people see that.
There’s an interesting thread that could have been picked up on there. Amber’s trauma resulting in an uncredible accusation that leads her friends to doubt her. Find Your Friends isn’t very interested in that. Instead, her one note friends are upset she got them kicked out of another party. They don’t particularly care about why. That would require the slightest bit of character depth.
The women at the center of Find Your Friends aren’t the only one not characters running around. The men don’t fair any better. Almost every man under the age of 40 is a sex-crazed, murderous psychopath. Amber claims to have been pursued by a truck full of these monsters while leaving the party on her own. We know it’s true because we’re, unfortunately, watching the movie. This is as far as Find Your Friends goes with questioning Amber’s account of the ordeal. Her friends think she’s been acting weird lately. Where’s the next party?
Unfortunately for her friends, the men in the truck really were out there. One of them learns that that in a permanent fashion when trying to (of course) return to the party. These men just drive around the desert looking to murder these women, I guess. We’re not going to find any deeper analysis than that here. Even though one of their friends is missing…nothing is going to stop the group from enjoying their vacation. When a trip into the desert results in another missing friend…the remaining trio finally start thinking something might be wrong. From there Find Your Friends becomes something more akin to a revenge thriller. For one scene, at least.
The basic characters surrounding Amber could have worked had there been a purpose for them to be that way. As she is the only one who seems to be even slightly interested in becoming something more as a person…the two sides of one note characters should have helped her story stand out. Unfortunately, Find Your Friends doesn’t seem to be sure what Amber’s story even is. We get one scene of her voicing displeasure with her current life. The rest of the movie we’re watching her wander around as aimlessly as the other mindless automatons. The story isn’t really about friendship. It isn’t really about violently misogynistic men. It isn’t even really about Amber. Like most of its characters, Find Your Friends doesn’t seem to be about anything.
I’m not saying that the rape revenge genre is full of intelligent thoughts and elegant design…but Find Your Friends falls short of even their collective low bar. Bad things happen…so we do bad things back. And that’s the resolution. No character growth…no new knowledge gained. No purpose…no point. If the intent was to capture solely the feelings of escaping a sexual assault…leaving Amber’s back and forth crippling trauma and violent responses as the entire point of the piece…ok. I can at least understand that. But Find Your Friends doesn’t feel like it’s even going for that basic level of storytelling. There’s no effort put into relaying it in any way that becomes meaningful or impactful. It just does things. One note at a time.
Scare Value
Find Your Friends isn’t an example of quality for Shudder to hold up for people to see. It does represent a recent boom in the number of original titles available on the streaming service. But quantity rarely beats quality. If Shudder keeps pumping out more and more releases…I’m sure a few hidden gems will be among them. For now, however, Find Your Friends is an intensely skippable movie full of loud, uninteresting people who find themselves (eventually) targeted by loud, violent people. You know who you’re supposed to root for…but not because Find Your Friends bothers to make you want to. Mostly, you’re just rooting for the credits to arrive.
1.5/5
Find Your Friends Link
Streaming on Shudder
