Director Meredith Alloway’s feature debut, Forbidden Fruits, co-written with playwright Lily Houghton, has the DNA of a cult classic. At the film’s Monday evening world premiere, the Paramount Theatre audience was fully engaged, laughing from the first frame, collectively gasping, groaning, and cheering loudly to make their instant fandom known.
Apple (Lili Reinhart) leads a secret witch coven out of Free Eden, a retail store in a Dallas-area mall, and its logo font is so unmistakable you’ll recognize the inspiration immediately. Her inner circle – Cherry (Victoria Pedretti) and Fig (Alexandra Shipp) – operate by strict “Rules of Paradise,” including shine theory and only communicating with boys via emojis.
When new hire Pumpkin (Lola Tung) wiggles her way in via cinnamon pretzels from the mall’s pretzel shop where she works, the coven’s carefully tended garden begins to shift. There’s also Pickle (Emma Chamberlain), an excommunicated ex-friend who is, notably, not a fruit. And lending another big name to the roster, Gabrielle Union pops in.
Forbidden Fruits lands inside the inner circle of a Venn diagram constructed of Mean Girls, Heathers, Witches, and Biblical text. The latter is unmistakable but never overbearing, just a long Bible verse on a T-shirt here, a snake-in-the-garden metaphor there. The script is sharp and genuinely hilarious, and it aces the Bechdel Test so thoroughly because it barely notices men exist, which is sort of the point. “Women without a garden won’t grow,” Apple tells her coven, “so we have to build our own.” And when things go sideways, they go full slasher. It’s gruesome, bloody, and raging with wild energy rooted in sisterhood complicated by triggered vulnerabilities and stuffed-down pain. Tears, after all, are better utilized as ingredients in a bodily fluid potion served in a bedazzled boot.
The Q&A that followed, with the four lead actresses, director, writer, and three producers on stage, including Diablo Cody (Jennifer’s Body, Lisa Frankenstein), was nearly as charming as the film itself. The mall scenes were shot entirely at night at the same mall as Mean Girls (with the fountain rebuilt), which served as one of several Easter eggs tucked throughout. Alloway said they were guided by a simple creative principle: They “followed the giggle.” Editor Hanna Park, who received a rare editor shoutout for the film’s “fever-dream” sequences, also cut Shiva Baby and Bottoms, which explains the quick-witted pacing. Producer Trent Hubbard offered well-deserved praise: “Bow down to Diablo [Cody],” who “paved the way for this to happen.”
Houghton said she was inspired by her time working at an unnamed retail store (“fairy lights everywhere; Haim on repeat”) and wrote the stage play, Of the Woman Came the Beginning of Sin and Through Her We All Die, from which the movie is adapted. She began thinking about what temptation means for women, she said, about being told from a young age that we are the temptation, and how that might, over time, create a particular kind of psychosis. Forbidden Fruits is that psychosis rendered as ritual, gore, and a classic in the making, babe.
Forbidden Fruits opens in movie theatres March 27.
