‘Forbidden Fruits’ Review: Witchy Lili Reinhart Leads a Juicy Disaster That’s Hard to Resist

Director Meredith Alloway makes her baffling feature-length debut set in a Texas-area mall.

In her mesmerizing feature debut, “Forbidden Fruits,” director Meredith Alloway reaches for the candy-coated cruelty of late-’90s cult classics — think “The Craft,” “Clueless,” and “Jawbreaker” — only to draw back a tonally chunky, intermittently delightful mess that never figures out which kind of witch movie it wants to be.

Set inside a suspiciously anachronistic Dallas-area shopping mall, this recent SXSW premiere follows a quartet of young women working and worshipping at Free Eden. The boutique looks reverse-engineered from a discarded Free People mood board and bears all the hallmarks of a bygone Instagram era. There’s Apple (Lili Reinhart), the poised but unpredictable queen bee; Cherry (Victoria Pedretti), a sexed-up cartoon with the bandwidth of a bobbypin; Fig (Alexandra Shipp), the vaguely “scientific” smart girl, who doubles as a wild card; and Pumpkin (Lola Tung), a wide-eyed newcomer who gets plucked from the store’s neighboring pretzel stand and pulled into the titular clique’s dreamlike orbit. 

Together, the Fruits form a coven — or, at least, something like a coven — wielding their soft supernatural powers between shifts, on and off the sales floor. The film is ostensibly aiming for biting satire in the post-#girlboss era, but its foundation already feels out of step with reality in early 2026. Co-written by Alloway and Lily Houghton (adapting Houghton’s 2019 play), the script leans heavily on a version of supposedly contemporary mall culture that never really existed. The effect isn’t pop-infused escapism so much as temporal confusion, conjuring a place that feels untethered in time but still as pandering and dated as its use of the word “lit.”

That disconnect bleeds into the script’s broader tonal instability. For the right genre crowd, “Forbidden Fruits” wants to be everything at once: a horror movie about female friendship, a parody about American consumerism, a camp comedy about insincerity in the digital age, and a feverish reflection on carefully curated identity. But instead of mixing those flavors together, Alloway tries stacking them for an experience that’s closer to a fruit kebab than a smoothie. The eventual shift from strained, bubblegum realism to full-blown deadly mystery amplifies that chaos. And by the time the coven’s antics escalate into blood-drinking and hexes, the story has already lost its footing, 

Yet, for all its confusion, “Forbidden Fruits” is only sometimes boring. Its most unhinged swings are often its most entertaining (watch out for that escalator!), and there’s something undeniably compelling about a film that treats sipping period blood from a bedazzled cowboy boot — or praying to Marilyn Monroe as a supernatural deity — with total sincerity. But those strong moments don’t evolve into one satisfying vision, instead leaving behind a disparate collection of original scenes that play more like window shopping in hindsight.

The same can be said for the performances, which operate on entirely different frequencies. Reinhart’s Apple anchors “Forbidden Fruits” with a controlled, menacing demeanor that channels magnetic superiority and suggests a much sharper movie lurking beneath this cut. Her role crescendos into something genuinely interesting, with flashes of unraveling that recall Fairuza Balk’s Nancy Downs or Reinhart’s own Betty on “Riverdale.” It’s the clearest through-line, even if it gets buried under the weight of competing subplots and bloated length.

Pedretti, meanwhile, commits fully to her bimbo persona, oscillating between titillating absurdism and unexpected discomfort. Styled like a hyper-sexualized Powerpuff Girl, Cherry is responsible for many of the film’s biggest laughs — and some of its strangest tonal misfires. A dressing room encounter involving a tutu plays like peak sex comedy, but her fraught relationship with Apple introduces a darker register that the film isn’t quite equipped to handle. As a result, Cherr is simultaneously over-the-top and oddly tragic, dragged down further by costuming that defies most logical taste (watch out for those bubble shorts!) 

Shipp fares somewhat better as Fig, bringing a natural charisma to the role that never fully materializes beyond its scripted quirks. And Tung, as Pumpkin, serves as the audience’s entry point but struggles to elevate the plot. There’s an implication early on that Pumpkin harbors her own secrets, but the portrait remains too blank to sell her detachment as a riddle worth solving.

Outside the core quartet, Emma Chamberlain steals a handful of scenes as a character named, wait for it, Pickle. And even background players add key spurts of weirdness, be it through their outrageous underreactions to violence and gore — or their disproportionate bursts of enthusiasm for beats of melodrama. (One nameless restaurant patron, delivering the line “How could it get any better?” with Oscar-worthy gusto, briefly pushes the film into the kind of accidental brilliance that could see it reclaimed as a goofy cult hit down the line.)

On a technical level, “Forbidden Fruits” is frustratingly flat. The cinematography drains vitality from even its most visually obvious ideas with lighting that blunts the impact of nearly every other department. The commercial setting, seemingly intended as a vibrant playground of excess, dissolves into a beige void that’s less BuzzFeed and more “The Brutalist.” Editing compounds that issue, and not even a familiar and fun soundtrack can distract from a narrative that endlessly circles the same jokes and conflicts without properly deepening them.

That repetition underscores the film’s inability to articulate what it’s actually about. The ingredients are all there, but never coalesce into a coherent thesis. Witch stories have long served as fertile ground for exploring feminism, and the mall provides a natural stage for critiquing the crux of current western culture. But while “Forbidden Fruits” gestures at both ideas, it never invests entirely in either. It piles on additional elements — namely, creepy Barbie dolls and an abrupt tornado — in an ill-advised attempt to generate intrigue.

Still, there are flashes of something funnier and more self-aware in “Forbidden Fruits.” Alloway’s debut is a beautiful disaster that even at its weakest points has just enough glamor and guts to justify most genre girlies taking the journey eventually. Just don’t expect to find anything especially ripe, or rotten, once you check it out.

Grade: C

From Independent Film Company and Shudder, “Forbidden Fruits” is in theaters on Friday, March 27. The film premiered at the 2026 SXSW TV and Film Festival.

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