Variety reported yesterday that Shudder has acquired Find Your Friends, the feature debut of writer and director Izabel Pakzad. The deal includes rights in North America, UK, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Australia, and New Zealand.
(Find Your Friends) follows Amber and her four best friends as they flee Los Angeles for a girls’ trip in Joshua Tree, only to find themselves unwelcome in a desert town simmering with barely concealed hostility. After their encounters with the locals grow more threatening, resentments within the group begin to surface. Eventually their vacation spirals into a violent struggle for control and survival.“Shudder champions work that refuses to play by the rules and challenges everything we think young women should be in genre films. My hope was to make a film that audiences find to be raw, unapologetic and bold and I am so grateful to be partners with them, I couldn’t imagine a more perfect home for ‘Find Your Friends,'” said Pakzad.“We’re thrilled to share ‘Find Your Friends,’ a visceral film that begins as an escape into the stark beauty of the desert and quickly descends into a gripping struggle where paranoia, resentment, and survival collide,” said Emily Gotto, senior vice president of acquisitions and productions at Shudder. “Audiences should prepare for an intense, emotionally charged experience that rethinks the trope of the final girl.”
Our own Josh caught Find Your Friends when it premiered at Fantasia back in the Summer. There they found an unexpected complexity in Pakzad's script for a film that is not so easy as to simply tag a revenge thriller.
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...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.