Alexandra Shipp, comedy, Dallas, Emma Chamberlain, Forbidden Fruits, Gabrielle Union, horror, Jordan Duarte, Lili Reinhart, Lola Tung, Meredith Alloway, movies, reviews, Siddharth Sharmax, Victoria Pedretti
April 7, 2026
by Carla Hay
Directed by Meredith Alloway
Culture Representation: Taking place in Dallas and briefly in Scottsdale, Arizona, the horror comedy film “Forbidden Fruits” (based on the play “Of the Woman Came the Beginning of Sin and Through Her We All Die”) features a predominantly white cast of characters (with some African Americans and Asians) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.
Culture Clash: Four witches, who are named after fruits and work at a women’s clothing store in a shopping mall, experience conflicts when three of the witches rebel against the group’s leader.
Culture Audience: “Forbidden Fruits” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of the movie’s headliners and shallow horror movies about witches and female frenemies.
“Forbidden Fruits” is a horror comedy that strains to be funny and doesn’t deliver anything scary until the last 15 minutes. It’s a sluggishly paced, meandering movie about a coven of emotionally immature witches who work at a Dallas clothing store. There’s a lot of fake feminism in the movie, which can’t decide if it wants to celebrate female empowerment or skewer it.
Directed by Meredith Alloway (who co-wrote the “Forbidden Fruits” screenplay with Lily Houghton), “Forbidden Fruits” had its world premiere at the 2026 SXSW Film & TV Festival. The movie is based on Houghton’s 2019 Off-Broadway play “Of the Woman Came the Beginning of Sin and Through Her We All Die.” “Forbidden Fruits” is Alloway’s feature-film directorial debut. “Forbidden Fruits” takes place in Dallas and briefly in Scottsdale, Arizona. The movie was filmed in Toronto.
“Forbidden Fruits” has been described as a cross between 1996’s “The Craft” and 2004’s “Mean Girls.” However, the central characters in “The Craft” and “Mean Girls” are students in high school, which explains their juvenile attitudes. In “Forbidden Fruits,” the central characters are all women in their early-to-mid-20s, which makes their childish pettiness harder to tolerate. In addition, “Forbidden Fruits” is nowhere near as interesting as “The Craft” or “Mean Girls.”
“Forbidden Fruits” begins in a parking lot, with a scene that is an example of the movie’s stale comedy. The witch leader—a haughty and rude “queen bee” type named Apple (played by Lili Reinhart)—is parked and alone in her car in a Dallas shopping center called the Highland Place Mall. Apple notices that an unnamed middle-aged man (played by Jordan Duarte) is parked next to her in his truck, and he is leering at her. He has a license plate that reads “#1 Daddy.”
Apple indicates with her hands that she would be okay with this stranger masturbating while he looks at her. He eagerly grins and begins to masturbate. As the man is focused on pleasuring himself, Apple is still seated in the driver’s seat and has a carafe of hot coffee. She opens her car window and throws the hot coffee on him, so that a lot of coffee can land on his groin area.
Apple then smugly walks into the shopping mall, as if she knows nothing will be done about this crime. Of course, nothing happens to Apple, and this incident is never mentioned again. “Forbidden Fruits” has an annoying pattern of trying to define “female empowerment” as women treating men badly, even though everyone knows that if the gender roles were reversed and men treated women this way, these awful actions would get criticism for being misogynistic and damaging.
As it turns out, Apple’s coffee-throwing attack is one of the few things in the first two thirds of the movie that is memorable, even though it’s a cheap and tacky gag. Most of the movie drags with repetition and is polluted with a lot of eye-rolling dialogue that doesn’t sound like how real people would ever talk. And as the leader of this witch coven, Apple is just a pompous bore who likes to lecture her minions on what they should do and how they should act.
Apple works as sales clerk at a women’s clothing store called Free Eden. In the beginning of the movie, there are two other witches in this coven, which requires all of the witch members to have their first names be the names of fruits. Fig (played by Alexandra Shipp), the most outspoken subordinate member, is planning to go to grad school. Cherry (played by Victoria Pedretti) is an air-headed flirt who is desperate for the approval of Apple and the attention of men. Fig and Cherry are also sales clerks at Free Eden. Apple openly disrespects Cherry by frequently hurling insults and condescending comments at Cherry.
The coven will soon let a fourth member join the group. Her name is Pumpkin (played by Lola Tung), who meets these three witches because Pumpkin works at a nearby pretzel shop called Sister Salt’s in the shopping mall. Pumpkin seems to be a friendly people-pleaser. In her first few scenes in the movie, she hands out samples of cinnamon-covered pretzels. Apple is dismissive of Pumpkin until she finds out that her name is Pumpkin.
It isn’t long before Apple decides that Pumpkin should work at Free Eden and join the coven. There happens to be a job opening for a sales clerk at Free Eden because the person who previously had the job is a former coven member who left the job when she was ousted from the coven for a reason that is eventually revealed in the movie. This former colleague is named Pickle (played by Emma Chamberlain), and she gives the impression of being mentally ill. The first few times that Pickle is seen in the movie, she pounds her head against glass windows with a vacant stare until she is removed or asked to leave.
The coven’s initiation ritual is completely ridiculous, but not in a way that’s amusing. First, Apple orders Fig and newcomer Pumpkin to blow what is presumably marijuana smoke in the other coven members’ mouths. Then, the four women have to say their name and the season when their namesake fruit gets the most harvesting.
As part of the ritual, Apple orders Pumpkin to hit Apple hard in the face. Pumpkin hesitantly obeys this order. Apple eyes get teary, and she makes her tears drop inside a rhinestone-covered silver cowboy boot. And then, Apple tells Pumpkin that Pumpkin has to drink from the boot. Pumpkin obeys this command too. It all looks so stupid instead of hilarious.
Even though there are candles and other indications that this is a ritual, Pumpkin still asks, “Are you witches?” Apple doesn’t deny it and replies, “To put it simply, our magic is the mundane shit you would’ve been executed for in Salem. Being a witch is being a sister. And we all need sisterhood to survive. That’s why I created paradise.” Who talks like that except in poorly written movies like this one?
Pumpkin is then told the coven’s three main rules:
(1) The Shine Theory states that women illuminate when they surround themselves with other women who shine, and they don’t do anything to dim their light.
(2) The vindicar is a demon that derives pleasure from people’s pain and misery. The witches are supposed to banish vindicars. (By the way, there is no demon or demon banishment in this movie, so this rule is useless.)
(3) Only communicate with men by using text emojis. Cherry tells Pumpkin that this third rule is the most important rule.
Predictably, just like in “The Craft” and “Mean Girls,” the newcomer to the clique makes the clique a quartet, and she undergoes a makeover to fit in better with the clique. She changes the way she dresses and her hairstyle. She also becomes less introverted and more confident, but this assertiveness is perceived as a threat to the bossy leader, who wants to be in control of the group at all times.
Not much is told about these characters and what their interests are outside of the shopping mall. All of the coven members are from cities in Texas. Pumpkin says she’s from Plano. Fig is from Irving. Apple is from Grapevine. Cherry is from Highland Park.
Fig tells Pumpkin that Cherry’s entire family has died and left her without an inheritance. Apple’s father is deceased. Fig also tells Pumpkin that because the fathers of Apple and Cherry are deceased, then Apple and Cherry are part of the “elite Dead Dads Club.” Again: Who talks like this? No one who is appealing.
Meanwhile, Pumpkin is seen making secretive phone calls to Pumpkin’s mother, who is not seen or heard in the movie. Pumpkin isn’t as naïve as she appears to be. The short and furtive conversations that Pumpkin has with her mother reveal that Pumpkin has deliberately infiltrated this coven because Pumpkin wants to spy on someone in the coven. Pumpkin’s secret is revealed near the end of the movie.
The movie has nonsensical references to 20th century female movie stars. For example, Apple tells the other women in the coven that when they do private confessionals, they have to speak as if the ghost of Marilyn Monroe is in the room. Meanwhile, Cherry has a female Scottish Fold cat named Shirley Temple, whom Cherry brings to work because these witches are never seen at home.
Most of “Forbidden Fruits” becomes a series of sulking and moody scenes where Cherry and Fig are paranoid that Apple will find out that they’re dating guys and (gasp!) are communicating with them by not using text emojis. Fig’s love interest is Norman (played by Siddharth Sharma), who works at a restaurant. Cherry is having sex in the Free Eden dressing rooms with random guys who work at various places in the shopping mall.
As for newcomer Pumpkin, she confesses to Cherry that Pumpkin is a virgin. Cherry warns Pumpkin that Apple doesn’t approve of women being virgins. Too much of this disappointing and tedious movie is about Apple dictating what the coven members can or cannot do in their love lives. What happened to the Shine Theory of uplifting and supporting other women and letting them shine, instead of trying to control and demean them? (See the coven’s Rule No. 1.) Forget about that in “Forbidden Fruits.” Apple is all about being a mean-spirited cult leader.
Apple, Fig and Cherry often talk badly about Free Eden manager Sharon (played by Gabrielle Union) when they’re not in the same room as Sharon. Fig and Cherry try to boost Apple’s already oversized ego by telling Apple that Apple could do a better job than Sharon as the store’s manager. Sharon isn’t fully seen on screen until a mid-credits scene in the film, which veers wildly into plot twist after plot twist in the last 15 minutes. The end of “Forbidden Fruits” also hints that the “Forbidden Fruits” filmmakers want to make a sequel to this tripe.
The performances in “Forbidden Fruits” aren’t terrible, but a lot of it is very lackluster that reflects a script where not much happens for most of this movie that squanders its potential and plays it too safe. “Forbidden Fruits” aims for campiness and ends up with limpness. The backstory for Pumpkin and the reason why she’s infiltrated this coven are rushed in toward the end of the movie and are not adequately explained.
“Forbidden Fruits” also hints at homoeroticism in the group (such as the scene where they blow smoke in each other’s mouths, or the witches act flirtatious with each other), but it’s the equivalent of a queer-coded tease. None of the witches in this coven openly identifies as queer. (One of the witches is a closeted lesbian, which is revealed when the movie is nearly over.) If any of the witches have love interests, the love interests are only cisgender men.
Some aspects of “Forbidden Fruits” are commendable, such as the vibrant production design and character-driven costume design, even if the witches dress like they’re stuck in the early 2000s, when this movie is supposed to take place in the mid-2020s. Unfortunately, the movie’s cinematography is uneven, with lighting that looks often looks too flat. “Forbidden Fruits” has a burst of madcap energy and terror in the last 15 minutes, but it’s too little, too late. And ultimately, it’s hard to take so-called “feminist” witches seriously when they copy the same concept as Fruit of the Loom underwear mascots.
Independent Film Company and Shudder released “Forbidden Fruits” in U.S. cinemas on March 27, 2026.