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Sophia Ali, Zión Moreno, Helena Howard, Chloe Cherry, and Bella Thorne in Izabel Pakzad’s FIND YOUR FRIENDS. Courtesy of Shudder. A Shudder Release. |
“Find Your Friends” Review: Izabel Pakzad Brings Style, Female Fury and Real Power to the Desert Thriller
On paper, “Find Your Friends” follows Amber and her friends on a girls’ trip to Joshua Tree that quickly turns hostile. Unwelcoming locals, buried trauma and mounting resentment transform their desert escape into a violent game of survival and revenge.
That may be the logline, as they say in the business. What “Find Your Friends” is really about is danger — the kind that can be waiting just beyond the boundaries of a good time.
Writer-director Izabel Pakzad makes an assured feature debut by dropping the audience directly into a chaotic, nightmarish party weekend. She has little interest in guiding viewers through the usual hero’s journey. Instead, we are thrown into the noise, alcohol, heat, friendship and desperation surrounding a group of young women trying to lose themselves in the desert.
The party is already underway, and the feeling that something is wrong arrives almost immediately.
Amber, played by Helena Howard, travels to Joshua Tree with Lavinia, Lola, Zosia and Maddy for what is supposed to be a wild escape from ordinary life. The film initially offers the familiar ingredients of a twenty-something rager: cheap alcohol, loud music, sexual bravado, bruised friendships and a determination to keep having fun long after the fun has begun to curdle.
Pakzad captures that world so convincingly that you can almost smell the rancid beer, body sweat and desert dust. There is desperation beneath the animal energy, and the director understands that the endless party is not always about pleasure. Sometimes it is about avoidance.
The women at the center of this female-led psychological thriller are running from things they do not want to confront. As Amber begins to emerge from the haze, her friends remain committed to the party because it is the only escape they know. That tension gives “Find Your Friends” more weight than its revenge-thriller premise might suggest.
One character wonders why people go to college, find jobs, and work their lives away simply to earn a vacation. Why work at all, she asks, before admitting that she has no idea what she actually wants. It is a funny exchange, but also a revealing one. These young women may appear fearless and free, but they are drifting — another lost generation masking uncertainty with noise, substances and the performance of having a good time.
The mood changes when the group encounters local men whose hostility becomes increasingly threatening. What begins as discomfort escalates into something much darker, forcing the women to recognize how vulnerable they are in an isolated landscape where help may not come.
Pakzad has said the story was inspired by her own frightening experience of being harassed and chased by men during a Joshua Tree trip with friends. That personal connection can be felt throughout the film. The threat is not treated as an abstract plot device. It grows from a familiar fear: the sudden realization that a place that felt open and liberating can become a trap.
Violence against women is never easy for me to watch, but “Find Your Friends” understands that real predators exist. Genre cinema can provide a controlled space in which audiences confront that ugliness at close range, and Pakzad refuses to make the experience polite or comfortable.
The women are not presented as ideal victims or conventional horror heroines. They are vulgar, sexual, reckless, angry, and sometimes difficult to like. Pakzad rejects the old “final girl” expectation that a woman must be innocent or morally pure to deserve survival. These characters do not earn their power through goodness. They seize it through rage, chaos and retaliation.
That choice gives the film its bite.
Helena Howard brings a wounded intensity to Amber, while Bella Thorne, Chloe Cherry, Zion Moreno and Sophia Ali give the group its volatile chemistry. Their friendships feel messy and unstable, shaped by affection but also jealousy, judgment and unresolved resentment. As the danger outside the group increases, the fractures within it become harder to ignore.
The dialogue is occasionally rough around the edges, but that is also part of the film’s charm. These women have mouths on them, and their conversations sound impulsive, abrasive and alive. Pakzad is not trying to make them charming in a conventional way. She allows them to be loud, contradictory and emotionally careless.
Visually, “Find Your Friends” is striking. The cinematic Joshua Tree landscapes create a sharp contrast between the beauty of the desert and the menace gathering within it. The wide-open scenery suggests freedom, yet the isolation makes every threat feel more immediate. Pakzad and her creative team turn the desert into both a playground and a hunting ground.
At a fast-moving 93 minutes, the survival thriller rarely loses momentum. The film becomes increasingly feverish as Amber’s past comes into focus, the group’s toxic dynamics begin to collapse and the weekend shifts from rebellion to revenge.
Pakzad cites films such as “Spring Breakers,” “Kids” and “Climax” as influences, and their DNA can be felt in the movie’s collision of youth culture, hedonism and dread. There are also traces of the confrontational brutality associated with New French Extremity. “Find Your Friends” does not treat violence as decoration. When it arrives, it is meant to disturb.
The final stretch is where Pakzad fully announces herself. That last beat is fire — bold, satisfying and difficult to shake. It brings the film’s ideas about trauma, female anger and survival into sharp focus without sanding down their ugliness.
“Find Your Friends” may be provocative, but it is never timid. It takes the glittery bubble of a carefree girls’ weekend and exposes the fear, confusion and fury underneath it. Beautifully shot, fast-moving and unapologetically abrasive, the film marks Pakzad as a director-screenwriter to watch.
This critic is excited that Izabel Pakzad has arrived on the scene. She is an unapologetic, female-focused filmmaker whose command of visual storytelling, atmosphere, and genre reflects both strong training and a distinct point of view. There are exciting things ahead for this writer-director. Whatever she does next, count me in.
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Helena Howard in Izabel Pakzad’s FIND YOUR FRIENDS. Courtesy of Shudder. A Shudder Release. |
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