Find Your Friends

Grade: B-

Find Your Friends will be one of Shudder’s more unusual offerings. The streaming service is primarily known for horror titles, which this doesn’t quite qualify as—at least not for most of its runtime. It’s an hour of drinking, drugging, and general party carousing before it mutates into a patriarchy-revenge thriller in its final 30 minutes.

The obvious comparison will be I Spit on Your Grave, but I also thought of Gasoline Rainbow and How to Have Sex—both centered on a “last hurrah” vacation among recent graduates before they’re pushed into the real world. Find Your Friends has three meanings baked into its title. It’s the name of the location-sharing app the characters use to track each other. It takes on another meaning when someone goes missing. And it quietly suggests that these women may not actually be each other’s real friends.

When it comes to ensemble memorability, the gold standard remains Bodies Bodies Bodies. After watching that film, I could point to anyone on the poster and name the character instantly. Find Your Friends comes close. It follows five 20-something women who vacation together once a year, and I can recall most of their names without too much strain—but not all of them fully stick.

A lot of viewers have been put off by the apparent plotlessness of the first hour, and I understand why. Even in the opening sequence, I wouldn’t have guessed I’d end up recommending this as much as I ultimately do. The women are on a yacht when things first turn sour. A man takes Amber (Helena Howard) into a bedroom; she’s not interested and tries to leave, but it turns into a struggle. She escapes, but not cleanly, leaving him “feeling some kind of way.” Her friends, who left her alone with him, think they were doing her a favor. Amber is shaken and retaliates by smashing a punch bowl over his head, which gets the group kicked off the boat. And honestly, I was glad to see them go.

They move into an Airbnb, where the partying continues in the pool, then on to a club in the countryside, and then more drinking, more drifting, more avoidance. Amber is clearly triggered by what happened on the yacht, but her emotional shutdown is treated by the others as over-sensitivity. The film occasionally pauses the chaos just long enough for arguments about whether she’s “overreacting,” especially after she brushes off an encounter with the only genuinely decent man in the movie.

The five leads must have had an exhausting time filming this, even before the third-act violence kicks in. But they’re also quite good—fully committed, even when the screenplay doesn’t give them much to work with. A user review on IMDb put it bluntly in a way that stuck with me: it feels like a 13-year-old boy wrote the script, based on how he imagines older women talk. It’s a crude description, but not entirely wrong in terms of dialogue texture and shorthand. Still, the cast rises above it. My standouts were Helena Howard as Amber, Bella Thorne as Lavinia, and Chloe Cherry as Lola, who get the most opportunity to break out of the group dynamic.

And then there’s the last 20 minutes, where the film finally earns its Shudder placement. You will shudder—and yes, the pun is unavoidable—at the practical effects work, especially if you’re sensitive to, or simply possess, the body parts being targeted. It’s graphic, efficient, and occasionally queasy in a way that feels tactile rather than stylized. What it doesn’t offer is much in the way of legal or logistical aftermath; the characters behave in ways that don’t quite track with real-world consequences, particularly in the final stretch. But realism isn’t really the point. It’s about escalation and impact in the moment, not what comes after.

I don’t regret seeing Find Your Friends, and I’m glad I stuck with it through a first hour that actively tests patience. Writer/director Izabel Pakzad isn’t especially interested in what happens after the damage is done, but she does succeed at capturing a very specific, uneasy “right now” energy—one that lingers even when the plot logic doesn’t.

Grade: B-