Find Your Friends review: Female relations take center stage in unsettling survival horror

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Find Your Friends is a horror game exploring the clash between female pleasure and harmful male behavior. It features intense violence and challenges both the characters within the game and players to confront difficult questions.

Izabel Pakzad’s first film, *Find Your Friends*, starts out feeling like the indie hits *Spring Breakers* and *How to Have Sex*, but quickly shifts into a more terrifying direction, reminiscent of horror films like *Deliverance* and *Revenge*.

Okay, so it’s not *quite* as amazing as the films it’s clearly inspired by, but I still really appreciated that this movie didn’t shy away from some tough stuff. It really got into the pressures you feel from your friends, how accountable you are for your own choices, and just how complicated female friendships can be. It felt really honest, even if it wasn’t perfect.

The show boasts a talented young cast portraying characters who feel more authentic and complex than typical female characters in similar stories.

What is Find Your Friends about?

Find Your Friends follows a group of close girlfriends on vacation, dedicated to maximizing their fun – sometimes within the boundaries of the law, and sometimes not.

The story begins at a lively yacht party filled with dancing, flirting, and heavy drinking. The atmosphere quickly becomes wild and reckless, with people openly discussing sexual topics and using drugs like marijuana and cocaine, resembling an uninhibited, explicit scene.

Amber (played brilliantly by Helena Howard) is struggling while her friends are enjoying themselves, because her ex-boyfriend arrived with someone new. She parties excessively and, feeling disoriented, ends up in a difficult situation with a man who isn’t respecting her boundaries below deck.

The attack deeply affects Amber throughout the rest of the film. Although she doesn’t immediately share what happened with her friends, she feels they are responsible for leaving her vulnerable. She is also clearly struggling with trauma from the assault.

Because of these issues, the group of friends – including actress Bella Thorne – began to drift apart, but they continued with their party plans. They drove to the desert for an electronic music event where they drank and used drugs, and their fun was ruined by three unsettling men.

When Amber feels threatened and her friends don’t share her concern, she leaves them and sets off alone. This is when her vacation takes a turn for the worse, and the story transforms from a gritty drama into a frightening fight for survival.

Toxic men and toxic friends

The scary threat she – and later, the whole group – faces isn’t surprising. It’s a familiar trope that horror movie fans will likely have seen before.

What makes Pazkard’s script stand out isn’t the depiction of bad people doing awful things – that’s common in this kind of story. Instead, it cleverly focuses on the choices the main characters make that *lead* to danger, and then how they cope when things go wrong.

When Amber finally shares what she’s been through, the people closest to her don’t seem very concerned, understanding, or supportive. While her unpredictable actions might explain this reaction, it’s still heartbreaking knowing how much she’s hurting.

Watching these characters is unpleasant and predictable. They come across as abrasive and uninteresting, but their behavior seems to stem from the environment they’re in – one filled with excessive partying and pressure from guys to engage in risky behavior.

Although ‘Find Your Friends’ delivers as a standard survival horror film once the danger begins, the earlier parts of the movie are actually more compelling.

Is Find Your Friends good?

Right from the start, Find Your Friends throws you into the action with shaky, close-up camerawork, making you feel like you’re experiencing the girls’ wild and carefree lifestyle alongside them.

While the scenes of them dancing and discussing sex become a little predictable, they ultimately support a story exploring the pressures placed on these women by the world, and how those compare to their own desires and expectations for one another.

This ultimately results in a close look at how women interact with each other, and then a more direct comparison between men and women.

Find Your Friends score: 3/5

Isabel Pakzad’s first film, *Find Your Friends*, is a smart and engaging movie that explores how society views young women and the complex relationships they have with one another. While it occasionally uses familiar elements from the survival horror genre, it’s ultimately a thought-provoking story.

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2025-09-20 03:19