If The Plastics worked in a mall and were named after fruit, they’d be doing witchcraft
BY ANFAL SHEYX, IMAGE BY IFC FILMS
Forbidden Fruits was released in the UK on 27 March and follows Apple (Lili Reinhart) as she leads a coven in the Free Eden store where she works with Cherry (Victoria Pedretti) and Fig (Alexandra Shipp). Her coven is challenged when newcomer Pumpkin (Lola Tung) joins the store.
Forbidden Fruits opens with a montage of Free Eden employees Apple, Fig and Cherry going for lunch. Effortlessly, they get their meal for free and kick people off their designated table. Uniformly, they take a sip of their drinks. “I wish I was named after a fruit,” someone sighs in the background.
Film has a long history of intertwining witchcraft with female friendships, think The Craft (1996) and Practical Magic (1998), all of which present magic as a femme art form and use it for protection. But director Meredith Alloway takes this further in Forbidden Fruits. In the extension of Apple’s world, friendship is conditional, as both Cherry and Fig start to find out when their secrets slowly begin to be revealed to the newcomer Pumpkin.
Reinhart’s Apple is played to perfection, as revered as Regina George with a terrifying edge that makes the viewer shake through the screen. Pedretti and Shipp play Cherry and Fig, respectively, without a fault, bringing enough backstory to make their characters technically well-rounded but disappointingly shallowly explored.
After seeing Tung for years in The Summer I Turned Pretty, it becomes hard to separate her from the hit franchise, but she plays a serviceable role in Pumpkin as the young, wide-eyed ingénue with a hidden agenda. Emma Chamberlain adds a delightful cameo to Forbidden Fruits, bringing equal parts humour and absurdity to the role of the paranoid Pickle.
The film in its entirety is a pseudo Mean Girls (2004), pseudo The Craft (1996). Relatable enough to be engaging, absurd enough to be fascinating. The characters are playing mind games in one scene and hexing people in the second. The aesthetic of the film is undeniable; set entirely within the mall, the film, with its use of bright fashion and its big charm bracelets, brings back a nostalgia of the early 2000s so well that you’ll want to run to the nearest mall.
Crucially, the film centres on female characters in their early to mid-20s. These women are trying to build a support system at a time in their lives when it’s notoriously hard to do so. Forbidden Fruits examines female friendships in a fresh and somewhat gory lens that’ll make you wonder if there’s a coven in the basement of your favourite store.
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