{"id":528425,"date":"2026-03-17T08:11:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-17T08:11:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/528425\/"},"modified":"2026-03-17T08:11:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-17T08:11:08","slug":"the-salesgirls-may-be-witches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/528425\/","title":{"rendered":"The Salesgirls May Be Witches"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIf you see one spicy depraved satirical thriller this year that\u2019s a cross between \u201cMean Girls\u201d and \u201cThe Craft\u201d and something far darker, by all means make that movie \u201cForbidden Fruits<\/a>.\u201d It\u2019s an agreeably sharp-witted black-as-midnight comedy about four young women from Texas who work in a clothing-and-knickknack boutique at the Highland Place mall. They aren\u2019t just friends; they\u2019re part of a coven. Does that mean they\u2019re actually witches? Maybe, maybe not.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat we can say for sure is that they\u2019re shopping junkies obsessed with signifiers of their femininity (skimpy chemises, bracelets with charms, designer cupcakes), that their banter is peppered with the kind of slang (gorge, perf, vom) you\u2019d expect from a movie that has Diablo Cody as one of the producers, that at one point they do a willowy dance to an EDM cover of Bryan Adams\u2019 \u201cHeaven,\u201d and that three of them are under the spell of their ringleader, Apple (Lili Reinhart), a cold vixen in long straight red hair and stiletto heels who controls their every move with agendas of her own.<\/p>\n

\n\tEach of the girls is named for a different fruit. In addition to Apple, there\u2019s Cherry (Victoria Pedretti), who in earlier age would have been the \u201cditz,\u201d because she\u2019s got a sensual innocence (she spends every Wednesday afternoon boinking a different dude from the food court), but she\u2019s actually as sharp-tongued as the rest of them. There\u2019s Fig (Alexandra Shipp), the most serious and skeptical. And there\u2019s the mysterious newbie, Pumpkin (Lola Tung), who\u2019s working at a candied-pretzel store called Sister Salt\u2019s when Apple taps her to join the coven (though she doesn\u2019t put it quite that way). She leads Pumpkin into the girls\u2019 shared immersion in the ways of fashion and jargon and backbiting, their filtering of life through a scrim of pop, and the way that Apple layers her \u201csisterly\u201d directives with an academic feminist righteousness. That, in fact, is what makes the film original \u2014 its perception that for these girls, progressive anger is now inseparable from fashion.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIf they are in fact witches, what\u2019s the witchcraft about? In comedies like \u201cThe Craft\u201d or \u201cPractical Magic,\u201d witchcraft has mostly been a free-floating expression of female power. But in \u201cForbidden Fruits,\u201d Apple, the group\u2019s Regina George, uses her status as head witch to enforce her rules about the way things should be. (You\u2019re only allowed to text a dude using emojis.) Periodically, she\u2019ll send one of her comrades into the dressing room that serves as a \u201cconfessional,\u201d where the one you\u2019re confessing to is the spirit of Marilyn Monroe. Why Marilyn? Because Apple considers her the ultimate female martyr, and says \u201cno one could control her, not even the president.\u201d Apple has a JFK assassination theory about Marilyn. According to the theory, Marilyn was murdered \u2014 by JFK \u2014 precisely because she couldn\u2019t be controlled. In Apple\u2019s eyes, the ghost of Marilyn now hovers over every dance of power between a man and a woman.<\/p>\n

\n\tCherry, promiscuous and confused, actually seems to have a bit of Marilyn in her. But what of the others? As Fig pursues a romance, which Apple tries to squelch, we realize that Apple, with her fear and loathing of men, is a witch of the spirit. Yet Lili Reinhart plays her with a diamond-hard smirk and a gleam of perception that lights up the screen. She\u2019s like Parker Posey crossed with Ann-Margret. She has the potential to go far.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAt first, cued by everything in \u201cForbidden Fruits\u201d that\u2019s reminiscent of those earlier films, we think it\u2019s all for fun: a high-camp giggle trip. But the film\u2019s first-time director, Meredith Alloway (who co-wrote the script with Lily Houghton), has a vision that\u2019s less facile and more contemporary than that. She has made a screw-loose comedy of stylized youth attitudes that doesn\u2019t pretend to be \u201creal,\u201d but it\u2019s also a serious movie that asks: What do young women today want? Love or justice or power? Or all three? And is any one of the three more powerful?<\/p>\n

\n\tThe movie takes a turn into suspense when Apple leads the others in putting a hex on someone, and the hex appears to work. What happens is unnerving, at which point the film passes through a looking glass of fear. There\u2019s something new at work \u2014 a cultural hairpin turn \u2014 in the way that Apple is made out to be a figure of commanding but toxic damage. \u201cForbidden Fruits\u201d goes over-the-top into shock and violence (which is staged with great wit), but what drives the movie forward is how it tries to pull its characters out from under the influence of someone whose witchery has made men the enemy. The movie says: It\u2019s time to break that spell.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you see one spicy depraved satirical thriller this year that\u2019s a cross between \u201cMean Girls\u201d and \u201cThe…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":528426,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,237596,206,66422],"class_list":["post-528425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-forbidden-fruits","tag-movies","tag-sxsw"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=528425"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528425\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/528426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=528425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=528425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=528425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}