Fifteen (Quince) had its world première at SXSW, 15 Mar 2026
Fifteen (Quince) opens with two fantasies in rapid succession. In the first, 14-year-old best friends Ligia (Greta Martí) and Mayte (Macarena Oz) are the centre of attention at their joint quinceañera, dancing in perfect sync with both each other and some handsome white-clad young men to general cheers and applause – only for the suitors suddenly to vanish and for the two best friends to realise that the other partygoers, seated and looking bored, have in fact completely ignored their carefully choreographed grand entrance. “I think they would notice if something happened to us,” Mayte says to Ligia, which introduces their second fantasy, in which the two girls, smiling, cut their own throats – and when even that fails to get attention, they repeatedly stab one another, laughing all the while as they spray blood over themselves and everyone else.
In fact Ligia and Mayte are just play-acting in Mayte’s bedroom, and their quinceañera is not for another three months – yet in these imaginary scenarios (which are also oblique foreshadowings of what is to come) we see both their desire to be centred and adored, and their self-destructive death wish. For as they wait on the precipice of adulthood, they long all at once to stand out and to fit in, even as their budding sexual drives and their emerging mortality salience are rushing headlong towards the edge. Ligia wonders whether she should go all the way with her boyfriend Joel (Andre Fajardo) – and eventually does – while Mayte’s unexpressed love for Ligia seems to go beyond the merely homosocial, so that the other girls’ bullying taunts that the pair are ‘dykes’ hit Mayte differently from Ligia. As their hormones get the better of them, these two must also, as decidedly working-class teens, find their place in a ritzy high school where Ligia’s mother Nora (Malena Sandy) is the lowly, overlooked cleaner while privileged Genoveva (Aminta Ireta) and her clique of wealthy, thin classmates are the queen bees.
All these growing pains assume monstrous form when Joel is attacked by a local subterranean ahuízotl, and passes on the curse to Ligia in the form of a rapidly growing foetus in her belly, whose birth, if it is allowed to take place, might not only see her transformed from girlhood to maternity within a couple of months (becoming, as Nora did, a single teen mother), but also might just herald world-changing apocalypse. All of which makes Fifteen a Mexican coming-of-age horror comedy remixing elements as much from Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976), John Fawcett’s Ginger Snaps (2000) and Karyn Kusama’s Jennifer’s Body (2009) as from Mark Waters’ Mean Girls (2004).
Taking in a wealth of difficult themes – teen pregnancy, backroom abortion, class conflict and closeted desire – Fifteen, directed by brothers Jack and Yossy Zagha and written by Ricardo Álvarez Canales and Andrzej Rattinger, reifies the horrors of adolescence as a murderous cacodemon that takes teens over from the inside and drives them to do terrible things against their enemies, their loved ones and themselves. At the same time, the real apocalypse that these girls are facing is the adult world, once the knives come out and the fairytale fantasies (the dresses, the tiaras, the formal dance) associated with this teen rite of passage give way to harsher rigours and responsibilities.
strap: Mean girls and monsters: Jack and Yossy Zagha’s class-conscious high-school comedy horror figures adolescence as a demon gestating within
© Anton Bitel
