Find Your Friends (2026) Review | A Chilling Survival Horror
Director: Izabel Pakzad
Stars: Helena Howard, Bella Thorne, Chloe Cherry, Zion Moreno, Sophia Ali, Chris Bauer, Jake Manley
Running time: 92 mins
This engaging women-in-peril horror marks the feature debut of writer-director Izabel Pakzad, who based her screenplay partly on her own experience. Rooted in painfully relatable fears of the dangers posed to women by toxic, predatory male behaviour, it’s a slow-burning thriller with a satisfyingly brutal final act.
Helena Howard (I Saw The TV Glow) stars as Amber, a recently graduated twenty-something who heads to the California desert for a concert and a weekend of partying with her best friends: sensible Zosia (Zion Moreno), hedonistic Lola (Chloe Cherry), cool girl Maddy (Sophia Ali) and party planner Lavinia (Bella Thorne). However, the weekend gets off to a bad start when Amber has a bad experience on a yacht, leaving her resentful of her friends for not having her back.
Things don’t improve for Amber when she reaches the concert, because even the seemingly nice musician (Harrison Gilbertson) she hooks up with ends up triggering memories of her recent experience, leading to a drugs-and-booze-fuelled freak-out. To make matters worse, when she tries to leave, she’s chased by a trio of violent men they had brushed off earlier, who are looking for revenge on her and her friends.
Initially, the film seems like it’s going to be a standard Final Girl horror, but Pakzad’s script kicks hard against those tropes, to satisfying effect. To that end, the characters are not always sympathetic (especially the nominal lead) and they are entertainingly vulgar and sex-obsessed throughout. If anything, it’s like each of them is the sort of character who usually gets killed off first in this sort of thing, for indulging in some combination of sex, drugs and alcohol.
Pakzad’s stated intention with the film – at least according to the press materials – was to break the machinery that produced the Final Girl cliche with acts of transgressive violence. Her acknowledged reference points include New French Extremity classics such as Martyrs and Inside, and those influences are readily apparent in a gasp-inducing (and squirm-inducing) final act that it would be churlish to spoil here.
The performances are excellent across the board, with each of the main cast making their character distinctive, despite the fact that they’re playing ostensibly similar types. They also have strong group chemistry, which is nicely detailed in their shared drinking rituals, such as repeating the following when doing shots: “Take a shot, take a shot like a bad bitch can,
If you can’t take a shot like a bad bitch can,
Then you shouldn’t have a motherfucking shot in your hand”.
There’s also strong support from Chris Bauer (as an annoyed neighbour), while Jake Manley and Israel Broussard are good value as the toxic male assholes. In fairness, there is at least ONE ostensibly nice-guy male character in the cast – Zander Bleck as Lavinia’s “Coachella Crush” Cameron – but he’s given very little screentime.
In short, this is an engaging, well-acted thriller that delivers some satisfyingly nasty moments, as well as a hefty kick to the unmentionables of predatory male behaviour. It also marks out writer-director Pakzad as an exciting new genre talent to watch, and it will be fascinating to see what she comes up with next.
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