We are only three days into Fantasia 2025, and we may already have one of the festival’s most controversial selections in director Izabel Pakzad’s harrowing revenge thriller, Find Your Friends.
When a squad of Gen Z besties make the trek out to Joshua Tree for a drug fueled girls trip, things go pear-shaped almost immediately as pressures from within and without take their toll. Amber (Helena Howard) isn’t exactly the leader of the group, but she is the focus. Having recently endured a drunken sexual assault at a boat party, her guard is way up while her friends blaze a hedonistic trail through the southwest. As she makes her first hesitant steps into their fantasies, the group begins to fracture when what was supposed to be a no holds barred bacchanalia devolves into a fight for their lives.
I don’t know that I’ve ever been as consistently infuriated with the actions of characters on screen as I was throughout the entire runtime of Find Your Friends. At every step, these women disregard each other’s safety in lieu of satisfying their own desires, ultimately putting themselves and their friends at grave risk. Amber and her friends – Lavinia (Bella Thorne), Zosia (Zión Moreno), Maddy (Sofia Ali), and Lola (Chloe Cherry) – are all looking for a good time, but they are confronted by horrific men at every turn, and the ways in which they react to these threats is shocking.
Find Your Friends could very easily have been a simple story of women being attacked by men, banding together to fight the threat, and overcoming violence through teamwork. That’s the simple version of this story. Pakzad’s script isn’t interested in easy answers, though, and what we get is a much more complex and terrifying endurance trial of a film. In Pakzad’s world, it is every partier for themselves, while some may attempt to resist the swiftly encroaching danger together, some of them ignore it altogether, leaving their compatriots to fend for themselves, even actively berating each other for being afraid.
While Amber’s hackles are up for the entire film, that’s not the case for everyone. Her yacht assault is a matter of debate for some in her group, after all, she had been drinking, so maybe it was just a regretful experience, rather than an actual attack – or so some of her friends have conjectured.
What starts out as a kind of bad party vibe brought on by indiscriminate drug and alcohol use and toxic selfishness turns into a straight up survival horror when the locals begin harassing what they see as interlopers on their community. As Amber’s friends start to disappear after striking out on their own, a sinking feeling descends over the party and these friends finally have to band together to defend themselves, but they’ve been pushed so far by this point that defense is no longer sufficient. Now it’s time to punish.
Find Your Friends is a complicated movie to parse. On the surface, it’s about young women looking for a good time who are attacked by a series of psychotic men with brutal and sinister designs. And that is a part of the story, for sure. However, while the men are the immediate threat, they are frequently helped along by the group’s unwillingness to stop the party, and even that has raises incredibly knotty issues in itself.
Should these women feel safe seeking their own self-gratification? In a perfect world, the answer is of course “yes”, but at what point do we concede that this is not a utopian world, and that there is a moral responsibility toward the safety of others, even when it is inconvenient? Are the men seeking to do harm to these women objectively the villains here? Or course they are. Are these villains helped along in their nefarious plans by these women ignoring the danger being presented? Unfortunately, also yes.
Find Your Friends is bound to be one of the most talked about films of the year. This is as bold a feature debut as I’ve ever seen from writer/director Izabel Pakzad, and I can only imagine it will spark spirited discussion as it makes its way through the festival circuit. The film’s aggressive moral ambiguity brings to mind the cognitive dissonance inspired by Paul Verhoeven’s 2016 shocker, Elle, while the plot plays out like a party-bound Wolf Creek or Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Love it or hate it, it’s impossible to remain neutral on Find Your Friends, and that may be the highest compliment a film can be paid.