Find Your Friends

by Hope Madden

I love Shudder. Truth is, Shudder is the only station I know how to find on our TV. I mean it. How I look forward to each new Shudder original! Happily, most of them live up to the excitement.

But every once in a while, you get a Find Your Friends.

Five unreasonably attractive and clearly alcoholic twentysomething besties wreak havoc on their livers and look good doing it. And screw the a’holes at this yacht party because these party bitches are headed to Joshua Tree to a better party followed by some desert tripping. Hell yeah!

I rarely stop watching a movie once I start it because it’s my job to finish the movie. I had to remind myself of this during Find Your Friends no fewer than four times before we even got to Joshua Tree.

We spend time with Amber (Helena Howard), Lavinia (Bella Thorne), Zosia (Zión Moreno), Lola (Chloe Cherry), and Maddy (Sophia Ali) twerking, doing shots, slapping each other’s asses, taking Molly, smoking joints, taking ‘shrooms, more shots, making out with strangers, driving wasted, saying “pussy” hundreds of times, talking incessantly about dick, and living as if we don’t exist in a country where you get away with rape but go to prison for defending yourself.

But that’s sort of writer/director Izabel Pakzad’s point, I suppose. That humans aggressively oblivious to their own safety still deserve safety, which is true. And that young women are often so frequently coerced and misused that they bond over it, joke about it, numb themselves to it. Also valid.

And that no women live in Joshua Tree at all. Only pick-up truck driving rapists and rifle carrying misogynists. This seems less accurate.

The heavy handedness of the film’s story and the one-dimensionality of its characters make it hard for Pakzad to build any momentum. There really is a story of female rage swimming beneath the sea of alcohol, but the story is so slight and the film so long and the climax so abrupt and the final shot so unearned that the message is tough to get behind.