Review: ‘Find Your Friends’ shows how female friendships fail in an alpha male world
2026 / Dir. Izabel Pakzad
Rating: 3.5/5
Watch if you like: Sirāt meets Spring Breakers, Bodies Bodies Bodies, Revenge, going to a yacht party with the worst people you’ve ever met in your entire life, the constant horror of being a woman in your 20s.
Every fan of horror movies has to suspend their disbelief when characters go off by themselves or do something stupid to get to the next death scene. In Izabel Pakzad’s debut feature, Find Your Friends, being abandoned by your friends to certain danger is entirely the point.
When we first meet Amber (Helena Howard, Madeline’s Madeline), she’s with her group of college girlfriends, having a blast getting trashed and dancing on a yacht filled with an array of stereotypically horrible men. Reminiscent of the opening of Spring Breakers or Gaspar Noé’s Climax, this and the many party scenes that follow are filmed as a fluid, chaotic orgy of hedonism with bodies, alcohol, drugs, and blaring EDM all merging into an interchangeable cinematic barrage.
After spotting an ex with a new girl on his arm, Amber quickly starts making out with some random yuppie bro to make him jealous. Her friends leave her alone with the guy, and he quickly tries to push past her limits. She justifiably smashes a glass bowl over his head, getting her and her friends kicked off the yacht, but they’re already onto their next adventure partying in Joshua Tree… and a new set of awful desert dudes.
What I assume most men who watch Find Your Friends will despise is that there are no developed male characters, and every man is either a predator or has the potential to be one (that’s what’s so smart about it). Though Pakzad’s movie finds its way to a more traditional horror narrative in its final third, she eschews traditional scares for Amber’s all-encompassing dread that there’s no place to turn to without some creepy guy trying to take advantage of her, including a group of guys in a truck stalking her from party to party.
It’s a given in Find Your Friends that this is a world that hates women, but what Pakzad is most interested in is how female friendships sour and how women fail each other, when they’re often only allies. The group repeatedly abandons Amber or others, goes off alone with strange men, or puts themselves in jeopardy to score drugs or find the next party thrill.
As in Spring Breakers, Find Your Friends features a number of up-and-coming actresses with “bad girl” reputations, such as Bella Thorne, Chloe Cherry, and Zión Moreno, in addition to Helena Howard. Each character is allowed to be crass, vulgar, and even repulsive, particularly in the case of Thorne’s Lavinia. Nor are they ever judged for wanting to party, even as it’s clearly self-destructive and borderline nihilistic. This is a portrayal of women seldom seen on screen and sure to be easily dismissed by audiences.
Likewise, Howard’s character Amber is no innocent final girl, nor is she the type of character in movies as I Spit on Your Grave that Find Your Friends owes lineage to, even while thankfully avoiding a lot of those tropes. She fights back, and even as she is clearly struggling to process the situation she’s in and communicate what she’s feeling, she doesn’t let her friends off the hook for letting her down. Even as they fail her over and over, she doesn’t abandon them and fights back.
This is definitely a heavy, often unpleasant movie that won’t be for everyone, and not without its flaws. The seams of its lower budget are certainly evident, and the partying becomes too repetitive until the film breaks out of its cycle in the final third. Still, I found the ideas it explores, the way it plays with the horror genre, and the complex female characters quite compelling. I suspect Find Your Friends will have trouble immediately finding a broad audience, but this is going to be a film that young women will find a lot of truth in, and every awful “alpha male” should be terrified of.