Find Your Friends review: Female relations take center stage in unsettling survival horror

Find Your Friends is a survival horror that pits female hedonism against toxic masculinity, before exploding in violent scenes that ask complicated questions of its characters, and the audience.

The feature debut of writer-director Izabel Pakzad, Find Your Friends is like a mash-up of indie darlings Spring Breakers and How to Have Sex, that transforms into a combo of horror classics Deliverance and Revenge.

And while it doesn’t quite reach the dizzy heights of those influences, the movie nevertheless tackles some heavy themes, to do with peer pressure, personal responsibility, and messy female friendship.

It also features an exciting young cast, playing characters that are more real and three-dimensional than the female folk usually found in this kind of fare.

What is Find Your Friends about?

Welcome to Italy

Find Your Friends revolves around a group of girlfriends vacationing together, and determined to have as much fun as is legally possible, while also sometimes indulging in the illegal.

Proceedings commence at a yacht party, where the group is dancing, flirting, drinking, discussing dicks, smoking weed, and snorting coke. Making these early scenes feel like an episode of Girls Gone Wild.

Amber (the superb Helena Howard) isn’t having as good a time as her friends however, as her ex has shown up with a new woman. So she goes extra hard, then somewhat dazed and confused, finds herself below deck with a guy who won’t take no for an answer.

That assault fundamentally – and understandably – changes Amber for the rest of the movie, for while she doesn’t initially tell her friends what has happened, she nevertheless blames them for leaving her alone with such a predator. While she’s also clearly suffering PTSD from the assault.

For those reasons, the friendship group – which includes modern-day scream queen Bella Thorne – starts to subtly fracture, but they nevertheless plough on with the party, heading to the desert for an EDM gig where more drink and drugs are consumed, and a creepy trio of guys spoil their vibe.

Amber senses danger, and when her gang doesn’t feel the same, storms off on her own. Which is when Amber’s holiday goes from bad to worse, and Find Your Friends shifts from dark drama to tense survival horror.

Toxic men and toxic friends

Though while the threat that she – and eventually the rest of the group – is forced to confront turns terrifying, it’s also pretty predictable, and something horror fans have seen in countless similar films.

But what elevates Pazkard’s script is that it isn’t really concerned with awful men doing terrible things, as that’s almost a given in this world. Rather it focuses on decisions our protagonists make that put them in those dangerous situations, then how they react when the trouble starts.

Because when Amber finally speaks her truth, there’s a disturbing lack of concern, empathy, or support from her nearest and dearest, which is maybe understandable based on her erratic behavior, but also deeply upsetting when we know the pain that she’s in. 

It’s uncomfortable and upsetting to watch, but also not much of a surprise, as our heroes are girls who are loud, rude, and vulgar, which makes them quite a boring hang. But based on this evidence, they’re simply a product of their environment, surrounded by frat culture and guys who are trying to get them drunk, and high, and into bed.

So while Find Your Friends works as a perfectly functional horror movie when the survival stuff starts, it’s arguably more interesting before the horror kicks in.

Is Find Your Friends good?

From minute one, Find Your Friends is an assault on the senses, with hand-held style camerawork putting us in the midst of the girls’ hedonistic ways.

Montages of them dancing to electro and talking about sex get a bit repetitive, but they’re in service to a story about what the world expects of these women, versus what they expect of each other and themselves.

All of which leads to an uncompromising examination of female group dynamics, followed by a more straightforward battle of the sexes.

Find Your Friends score: 3/5

When it’s not leaning into well-worn survival horror tropes, Find Your Friends is a thought-provoking directorial debut from Isabel Pakzad, about how society treats young women, as well as the complicated ways in which they treat each other.

Find Your Friends was reviewed at Fantastic Fest, while the film’s release date is TBD. For more scary stuff, check out our list of the best horror movies ever.