Publication Date: 04-09-2026

Forbidden Fruits (2026) review

Dir. Meredith Alloway

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★

Meredith Alloway’s Forbidden Fruits glistens with quips, personality, attitude, and mean girl energy, and yet when assessed as a horror-comedy, it’s underwhelming in both aspects.

It’s not for a lack of effort. The quintet of women at the center — Lili Reinhart, Lola Tung, Victoria Pedretti, Alexandra Shipp, and Emma Chamberlain — have all solidified themselves across various movies and series, but Alloway and Lily Houghton’s script requires their personalities to be homogenized. That would be fine, if the film — based on Houghton’s stage-play Of the woman came the beginning of sin, and through her we all die — didn’t feel like a wayward noodling well into the first hour before sharply pivoting into consequential territory and horror with little finesse.

Aggressively campy but leaden in its attempts to be playful within those confines, the film revolves around a group of glamorous saleswomen who work at Free Eden, an upscale clothing store inside a busy Dallas mall. The film’s opening scene involves Apple (Reinhart), the leader of the women, throwing her scalding latte on the crotch of a man in a car who is unsubtly masturbating to her. To say the tone is set there is putting it mildly.

During the day, Apple and her friends, Fig (Shipp) and Cherry (Pedretti), weasel customers into spending a few hundred dollars on threads sewn by wage-slaves in Taiwan. Once they clock out, the four friends gather and painstakingly assess each of the arbitrary rules they must follow (IE: no sex on Wednesdays). Enter Pumpkin (Lola Tung), a new girl who has a chance encounter with Fig, and is quickly inserted as the fourth member of the group. Pumpkin rightly suspects that something is amiss, perhaps even a supernatural bond that aligns these “Fruits” to be so tight-knit. With these thoughts festering in her mind, Pumpkin’s natural friendship slowly erodes into her acting as a mole, spying on the girls through a doll, and cozying up to each of them individually where she sees each of them aren’t so keen on following the rules they preach.

Cinematographer Karim Hussain’s posh interiors and costume designer Sarah Millman’s versatile, modern threads gift Forbidden Fruits the kind of “cozy horror” aesthetic that recalls something like Anna Biller’s Love Witch. Fittingly, the saleswomen turn through clothes like nobody’s business, and such a point naturally draws attention to the types of hues and fabrics Millman has each character don.

Alas, Forbidden Fruits feels less like its own refined story and more of a cut-and-paste of similar films, most notably The Craft and Mean Girls. Through Pumpkin, we do get one-on-one time with each of the girls to learn something about them: Fig has a fledgling romance she’s afraid to reveal; Cherry is a ditz who likes banging in dressing rooms; and Apple has the darkest secret of all. Houghton and Alloway attempt to instill some development to each of them, but I still couldn’t engage with any of them. Beyond being hollow and unlikable, they’re never as devilishly funny as they fancy themselves, and while Pumpkin is a plain Jane, she’s someone with whom I suspect first-day-of-school Cady Heron wouldn’t even try to be friends.

I should mention, for I’m betting someone is inquiring, that the film plays more like a black drama than a horror film. The only elements of the genre come late into the third act, and the tonal shift is jarring ala Final Destination. It’s evident Houghton and Alloway felt like raising the stakes would elevate the material, but by this point, it’s liable to wake most viewers up from a blank stare-coma.

When a movie has the ultimate Queen Bitch archetype saying lines like, “My job doesn’t define me. My hotness and my personality do,” you want to laugh and swoon over the incendiary implications, but Forbidden Fruits simply lacks the bite and wit to be adequately nutritious.

Starring: Lili Reinhart, Lola Tung, Victoria Pedretti, Alexandra Shipp, Emma Chamberlain, and Gabrielle Union. Directed by: Meredith Alloway.