SXSW '26: Forbidden Fruits Review

Making a movie about young, cool girls thriving in a mall is a pretty out-there concept in 2026. Do young people even still go to the mall? Are there even that many malls for them to go to anymore? Director Meredith Alloway dares to ask these questions with her film Forbidden Fruits. More than that she asks: What if these cool, pretty girls were also kind of witches in a constant power struggle within their own coven? It should all make for a fun, campy, bloody time at the movies. Alloway certainly seems to be striving for that. There’s plenty of catty dialogue and thotty outfits to go around. Still, I left the movie still wanting more from all of this. There could have been more blood, more witchcraft, and definitely more Lili Reinhart. It was all enjoyable enough, but it still left me feeling a little empty after my time at this particular mall with these four witches.

The story centers around a group of three young women in their early 20s working at a store called Free Eden which sells festival-ready, bohemian fits for the cool girls of today (guess which store they’re parodying). All these girls are named after fruits. There’s Apple (Lili Reinhart), Cherry (Victoria Pedretti), and Fig (Alexandra Shipp). They are the queen bees of the mall, and everyone else working there knows it and envies them. This is especially true for Pumpkin (Lola Tung), a girl working at the pretzel shop, which is apparently the lowest rung on the malls’ social status ladder. Pumpkin is desperate for a job at Free Eden and her place in the store’s fruit clique. After several attempts she worms her way into employment at the store as well as into a place within the friend group. After learning that the girl gang also functions as a coven, Pumpkin is initiated into the group, learns their rituals, and is ready to hone her power – or at least that’s how it seems. 

This is where things would ideally pick up and the real fun could begin. These girls should be placing all kinds of wild spells on their enemies and ex-lovers. The mall is their playground in which they can do no wrong. So, if they have as much power and influence as the movie insists they have, then these young witches should be having way more fun with it. Instead, the movie shifts into a lull. Apple is noticeably absent from the second act and Pumpkin spends her time learning about the other, less interesting fruits, Cherry and Fig. It’s a real shame because Reinhart is great as Apple, the ruthless, impossibly attractive leader of the coven. She says terrible, hilarious things to her so-called friends and they worship her for it. Regina George is the clear influence for this character, but Reinhart manages to make it all her own. Unfortunately, she doesn’t make a significant reappearance until the third act. So we watch as Pumpkin plots and schemes her way into trying to take over the coven for yet-to-be revealed motives. If Pumpkin is a witch with the power to cast all kinds of spells, her ascent to the top of the squad should be way more exciting. Instead her tactics seem limited to eavesdropping on her new friends in order to exploit their weaknesses. The logic of The Fruits’ magic powers is murky at best. 

So, we hang out in the mall with Pumpkin, Cherry, Fig, and sometimes Apple until we get to the fountain-based climax. I obviously won’t spoil the ending here, but it definitely comes out of left field. When Pumpkin’s motivations for infiltrating the Fruits cult are revealed I had a very “Huh? Okay” moment. Rather than it being this big, epic, magical finale like The Craft, we get more of a muted ending to our tale of the Fruits. Sure, there is some fun bloodshed and a couple cool kills, but a movie like this could have given its audience way more of a gory showdown. Spectacle is essential to selling a story about mean, fashionable, power hungry witches in a mall. 

It’s not a total loss of a movie, and there’s definitely a lot to like here. The four leads all seem to be having a lot of fun with the material and fashion. Victoria Pedretti is especially a standout as Cherry, the ditzy optimist of the group. It takes a great actress to play dumb and funny this well and Pedretti kills it – I just wish Cherry had killed more than this performance. Forbidden Fruits feels like an almost great teen movie. A few different script choices and a lot more witchcraft and bloodshed could have made this movie a festival standout. Instead we are left with a mall movie that plays it safe and never realizes its potential. The Fruits deserved to have more fun.

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