“Forbidden Fruits” (dir. Meredith Alloway, 2026)
Image Credit: IFC Films
Any movie that inspires a critic to reference “The Craft” and “Jawbreaker” is enough to get my attention, and so I can’t wait to check out Meredith Alloway’s “Forbidden Fruits” on Shudder this month, even if IndieWire’s Alison Foreman wasn’t fully sold on its ripeness:
“In her mesmerizing feature debut, ‘Forbidden Fruits,’ director Meredith Alloway reaches for the candy-coated cruelty of late-’90s cult classics — think ‘The Craft,’ ‘Clueless,’ and ‘Jawbreaker’ — only to draw back an intermittently delightful mess that never quite figures out which kind of witch movie it wants to be.
Set inside a suspiciously anachronistic Dallas-area shopping mall, this recent SXSW premiere follows a quartet of young women working and worshipping at Free Eden. The boutique looks reverse-engineered from a discarded Free People mood board and bears all the hallmarks of a bygone Instagram era. There’s Apple (Lili Reinhart), the poised but unpredictable queen bee; Cherry (Victoria Pedretti), a sexed-up cartoon with the bandwidth of a bobbypin; Fig (Alexandra Shipp), the vaguely “scientific” smart girl, who doubles as a wild card; and Pumpkin (Lola Tung), a wide-eyed newcomer who gets plucked from the store’s neighboring pretzel stand and pulled into the titular clique’s dreamlike orbit.
Together, the Fruits form a coven — or, at least, something like a coven — wielding their soft supernatural powers between shifts, on and off the sales floor. The film is ostensibly aiming for biting satire in the post-#girlboss era, but its foundation already feels out of step with reality in early 2026. Co-written by Alloway and Lily Houghton (adapting Houghton’s 2019 play), the script leans heavily on a version of supposedly contemporary mall culture that never really existed; the effect isn’t pop-infused escapism so much as temporal confusion. Still, there are flashes of something funnier and more self-aware in ‘Forbidden Fruits,’ as even its weakest points have enough glamor and guts to justify most genre girlies taking the journey eventually.”
Available to stream June 26.
Other highlights:
– “Interview with the Vampire” (6/1)
– “Raw” (6/1)
– “Find Your Friends” (6/12)