Find Your Friends
★★
Dir: Izabel Pakzad
Runtime: 89 minutes
Released June 12, 2026
There are countless films that deal with frat boys who are on the edge of having to grow up but refuse. It’s the satire behind Old School but it’s a well that many writers have dipped into in order to try to say something about boys becoming men. Izabel Pakzad (Birds of Prey) dares to ask – what if they were women instead?
It’s a decent enough premise. Take a group of party-hearty sorority girls post-graduation whose lives revolve around “getting fucked up and getting fucked” and drop them in a situation where bad things happen. Unfortunately, Pakzad’s script ensures that the bad things are lazy and feel rushed. Any tension built into it is wrung out quickly or dodged smoothly, leaving the viewer in a perpetual state of “Well, so what?”
We’re introduced to the main group on a party yacht. Amber (Helena Howard, Shoplifters of the World) has just suffered a messy breakup and her friends are trying to convince her to get done up on liquor and various drugs and to hook up with some handsome rich boy. Despite her protests, Amber gets convinced and moves to make out with said boy to make her ex jealous. Handsome boy has other ideas, and within a shockingly short amount of time Amber ends up raped. Violence ensues; the group gets kicked off the yacht. Amber should probably go to the hospital and get some therapy, but her friends convince her it’s a better idea to go on their desert girl’s trip where they’ll get wasted in the middle of nowhere and hook up with more random guys.
Once in the desert, of course, things get ominous and they get stalked by a bunch of the unlikeliest looking bunch of desert rednecks in a souped-up Super Duty. The yacht-setup is it’s own problem; the desert part of the movie suffers severely from pacing issues and unearned shock moments. There’s a problem with the neighbor, a older desert dweller who at least sort of looks the part. He seems to hate outsiders and women in general. It’s an obvious red herring, of course, but it’s one that’s never followed through with in a satisfactory manner. There’s too much time spent setting up the scenery. We linger on the girls partying by themselves for far too long, setting up weak relationships between them that feel altogether too scripted. Aside from Amber, they’re all basically interchangeable, each one of them an archetype of a spoiled rich kid who doesn’t want to grow up and will keep the party going at all costs. There’s a severe likeability deficit, and while this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, the film seems to want us to side with them in the end and that ends up being difficult at best.
The film also lingers on the rock star’s party for too long, and the girls’ drug trip for too long. The antagonists show up, chase them a couple of times, and then end up flipping their oversized truck very quickly. There’s very little teeth to them, another glaring issue with the film. They all look like they are L.A. models moonlighting as actors, rather than the filthy dangerous desert trash the film desperately wants us to believe they are. Their motives for stalking and killing the girls is tenuous to the point of absurdity. If they wanted to torture and assault them, it would be at least in-film believable; the theme of men being predatory scum is fairly clear from the outset. The second they get their hands on Lola (Chloe Cherry, Euphoria), they quickly bludgeon her to death with a rock. Apparently they also hate outsiders, but only enough to beat them to death.
The final chase and confrontation is paced wildly faster than the rest of the movie, as though Pakzad spent so much time on desert vistas and establishing shots that she realized that she was rapidly running out of runtime. People die so quickly that there isn’t much of a chance to care about any of it. The red herring the film establishes early on finally happens, but then is over seconds later, leaving one to wonder what the point of any of it was. The torture that Amber inflicts on Jake (Jake Manley, Fisher Webb in iZombie) is pretty graphic, and would have been redemptive if any of the rest of the movie worked to make it climactic. In a better film, the scene where Amber graphically saws off Jake’s penis, on camera and with a good amount of screaming and blood, would have been iconic. Here, it feels gratuitous.
Find Your Friends is not a particularly well-made movie. The cinematography is fine and the acting is okay for what they’re going for. The pacing is terrible, though – if you like movies with long setups and quick, unsatisfying payoffs, then it’s tailor-made for you, but other than that it’s a frustrating thriller that could have been better with several rounds of edits and probably some cuts to the more interminable parts.
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