Find Your Friends

Kicked off a boat party for clouting an attempted rapist around the head with a punch bowl, Amber (Helena Howard) and her friends Lavinia (Bella Thorne), Lola (Chloe Cherry), Zosia (Zion Moreno) and Maddy (Sophia Ali) drive to Joshua Tree in the hope of having a high and boozy weekend at their rented accommodation to continue celebrating their graduations.

No sooner have they settled in than a grumpy neighbour (Chris Bauer) tells them to turn their music down. His parting remarks suggest that he sees the women as little more than privileged people taking advantage of the locals.

This attitude becomes even more pronounced when the women attend a concert where indulging in booze and drugs, they rouse the interest of some of the local men who only have one thing on their minds and don’t care how they get it.

Based on a similar experience writer and director Izabel Pakzad presents a harrowing picture of just how foul men can be. As they continually harass the women, track, stalk and kill. In the end Amber has enough and takes the matter into her own hands.

Pakzad however doesn’t hold back on the women having a good time (and then to excess) with their arguments and banter between themselves as they recount experiences with men are pretty gross.

There could be an element of finger wagging about the dangers of excess drink and drugs when Coby (Harrison Sloan Gilbertson), is introduced telling Amber that he’s been drugs and alcohol free for a while.

Amber takes this on, up to a point, but her immediate issue is that she and her friends are facing aggressive men hotwired with misogyny. And a vicious entitlement that even when they are at their most vulnerable are wickedly unrepentant.

So far, so polemic the narrative. The action and story move at a moderate pace, unsurprisingly ratcheting up towards the end. But within it there are times when the hand-held camera and unrelenting music may just feel like the viewer is being blasted out of the film.

Find Your Friends is available on Shudder.