Five female BFFs wish the party would never stop. Amber (Helena Howard), Lavinia (Bella Thorne), Zosia (Zión Moreno), Lola (Chloe Cherry) and Maddy (Sophia Ali) have all recently graduated, and are on the cusp of their adult lives – but in writer/director Izabel Pakzad’s debut feature Find Your Friends, they are treating this summer like their final gasp of adolescent excess.
They are on a boat, drinking and twerking together to songs about pussy – and it is not long before Tye (Blaine Kern III) enters this circle of women, making his move on Amber, who is the least experienced of the quintet. Upset that her ex Thomas is on board with his new girlfriend, Amber demonstratively kisses Tye on the lips belowdecks, only to find this nice-seeming guy trying to rape her, despite her unequivocal protests. Seeing Tye later on the boat with another woman (a cameo from Pazkad), Amber will be triggered into a violent response that surprises even her, and that will see the five of them kicked off.
The party does not end there. For the young women are headed out to an AirBNB in the remote interior where they plan to attend an outdoor concert from a band that Lavinia knows, and then to go tripping together in the desert. Yet they run into a gruff middle-aged neighbour (Chris Bauer) who is vocally unhappy about their loud music, and then into a group of younger local males oozing menace and malevolence – and Amber, still quietly suffering from the trauma of Tye’s recent assault, starts displaying fight-or-flight behaviours that her increasingly annoyed friends regard as mere killjoy paranoia, even as real dangers circle in from the shadows.
With its young women on their last hedonistic hurrah in a desert full of male predators, Find Your Friends starts like Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers (2012), ends like Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge (2017), and in between challenges viewers to find their way through a moral minefield of qualified consent, compromised action and rapid escalation. The girls may talk the talk and even walk the walk of a pleasure-seeking lifestyle ruled by a constant ambition to be ‘fucked up’, and indeed fucked – yet in a scene shortly after Tye’s fumbled attack on Amber, they one-by-one offer descriptions of their most awkward or embarrassing experiences with men, all of which turn out to be narratives of sexual assault. For all their projected confidence and empowerment, these women are casually victimised, seem not to expect anything better, and blithely reduce their exploitative treatment by men to little more than cringy anecdotes to be exchanged with their girlfriends for a laugh. This is a bleak picture of Gen Z womanhood in a patriarchal world.
Only Amber begins to question this culture of youthful abandon, even if in doing so she marginalises herself from the group. After meeting band keyboardist Coby (Harrison Sloan Gilbertson), and learning that he has been free of drugs and alcohol for a decade, she too starts wondering if all this intoxication and immoderation are really what she needs or even wants. And while her judgment may be impaired by the psychic damage of her recent encounters with men, and by the prevailing air of misogyny (both external and internalised) which everyone is breathing, she will ultimately find a way to turn the tables and to take back control. Find Your Friends may demand that we pick through the ethical wreckage of these actions to sort right from wrong, good guys from bad, but one thing remains certain: the party is well and truly over.
strap: In Izabel Pakzad’s rape-revenge debut feature, five party girls emerge from their hedonistic daze into the harsh realities of misogyny
© Anton Bitel
