The first time we set eyes on Apple (Lili Reinhart) in Forbidden Fruits, she’s exercising total control over a strange man with a few effortless, elegant gestures. Everyone who comes into contact with this red-haired, dead-eyed woman seemingly falls under her spell and begins bending over backward to make her wishes a reality. Perhaps her claims are true and she really is a witch, conjuring power from paranormal forces—or maybe she’s just really hot.
A sort of unholy union of Mean Girls and The Craft, Meredith Alloway’s film finds Apple working as a salesperson in a pricey clothing store at the mall. At night, she returns to the shop with colleagues Cherry (Victoria Pedretti) and Fig (Alexandra Shipp) to form a coven and curse out the men, mothers, and managers who’ve slighted them. When doe-eyed Pumpkin (Lola Tung) is drawn into their midst, she’ll soon find out just how effective those curses can be.
Forbidden Fruits immediately conjures its own strange reality where the boundaries between everything, including time, are a lot more porous. The butterfly clips and eye-scorching outfits suggest we’ve been thrown back to the turn of the millennium, and the fast-talking barrage of “babe” and barbs feels drawn straight from the teen shows and movies of that era, but the smartphones and Stanley cups suggest a more contemporary setting. During their rituals, Apple and her coven mates freely mix arcane phrases with shout-outs to bitch slaps and thigh gaps, perform blood magic, and recite Britney Spears lyrics all in the same breath.
It’s all utterly idiosyncratic, resulting in a filmic world that wears its Y2K influences on its sequin-covered sleeves but feels totally unique. It’s also a riotously fun place to spend time, captured in vibrant colors and bursting with life thanks to zippy dialogue and lively performances by actors who seem to be in perfect harmony with the film they’re in. Apple is a truly formidable leader, with an acid tongue and a glare that truly does seem to threaten spontaneous combustion, while Cherry’s ditsy, high-pitched antics are relentlessly funny.
The entirety of Forbidden Fruits takes place at the mall, which perhaps betrays its origins as a stage play written by Lily Houghton. But rather than undermining its cinematic quality, the single-location aspect makes it easier to accept the film’s wonky reality where we’re never quite sure if we’re watching actual witches, murderous lunatics, or just a bunch of retail workers with too much time on their hands. It’s like a spell, a compelling illusion that would fall apart completely if we ever crossed the outer boundary of the mall’s parking lot.
As Forbidden Fruits tries to build itself up to a dramatic conclusion in the final act, the outside world finally begins to seep in. We learn things about Apple and Pumpkin’s lives beyond the mall that serve to motivate a climax that’s almost perfunctorily bloody. The transition from comedy to something approaching actual horror doesn’t quite click, but when it’s operating as a 2000s-coded witchy hangout movie, Forbidden Fruits is pretty spellbinding.
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