Find Your Friends

This horror-adjacent thriller isn't just a bad movie -- it makes you feel bad about the entire human condition.

My gosh, I couldn’t wait for them to start dying.

One of the most powerful ways we engage with scary movies is to feel protective of the characters who are being hunted, and feel bad when they croak. It’s even more important to the success of the movie, I think, than fearing and despising the killer(s).

So what to say about “Find Your Friends,” a horror-adjacent thriller in which five college girls are stalked, assaulted and eventually offed by some local hooligans in the desert community where they’ve come to party? Yeah, I was glad to see them go.

Honestly, it takes way too long for the first death to happen. And without giving too much away, more survive than the prototypical “last girl” scenario, which left me dissatisfied.

This movie, debuting on the Shudder streaming network this week, isn’t just a bad movie. It makes you feel bad about the entire human condition.

I think writer/director Izabel Pakzad (who also has a small role in the film) is trying to craft a parable about toxic masculinity. The women just want to have fun, do drugs, dance and have consequence-free hookups. But everywhere they go, they keep encountering cads of one stripe or another.

Some are more obvious, like the rednecks who mack on them at a party, ply them with cocaine and then proceed to chase them around in their truck when they are rebuffed. Their leader (Jake Manley) has standard-issue “you think you’re too good for us” grievances that always seem to play out with a much greater degree of commitment to assholery than seems credible.

But then even the seemingly nicer guys turn out to be cretins. Early on Amber (Helena Howard) — more or less the main character and slightly less loathsome than her peers — throws herself at Tye (Blaine Kern III), a dreamy dude while they’re all partying on some rich guy’s yacht. She starts a heavy make-out session, but then he takes things too far and it becomes an attempted sexual assault.

Amber becomes P.O.’d that her friends all left the scene, leaving her vulnerable as she was drugged up to boot. In fairness, the women spend pretty much the whole movie on coke, booze, mushrooms and molly, so it would’ve been more challenging to find a sober moment than otherwise.

Still traumatized from that experience, Amber thinks she’s found something better in Coby (Harrison Sloan Gilbertson), a medium-level rock star playing at the desert party. He seems worldly and grounded, a former addict 10 years sober, and even sorta resembles Keifer Sutherland from “Lost Boys.” But he turns out to be not so great, either.

I’m down with the notion of a feminist horror in which righteous chicks fight off dudes displaying the worst traits of our chromosome. Gender relations seem to be at an all-time low among the younger generations right now, and I appreciate the idea of pop culture exploring that, even if it’s done in an exploitative way for entertainment purposes.

Problem is: I couldn’t stand these women.

Amber is the most sympathetic of the bunch, but even she makes some awfully bad choices that she then doesn’t seem to want to own. It’s notable that every bad encounter she has with a guy, she initiated. You can call that victim-blaming if you want, but as the central figure in a movie, it makes her rather hard to relate to.

The others are Lavinia (Bella Thorne), the bossy unofficial leader of the group who is the first to openly express regret for bringing Amber along; Zosia (Zión Moreno), the glue-gal who tries to smooth over the conflicts of the group; Maddy (Sophia Ali), tattooed and tough, who’s willing to cut Amber a break as long as it doesn’t harsh her own vibe; and Lola (Chloe Cherry), a prototypical dimwit blonde who can’t stand any downtime between the good times.

A phrase I sometimes use in reviews to describe my experience with a cast is, “I just liked spending time with these people.” “Find Your Friends” is the polar opposite — I just wanted get away from them.

These women have no identity, worthy desires or positive values. All they want to do is party. I believe they’re supposed to be college seniors (played by actresses in their late 20s or early 30s, natch) and seem to have no sense of responsibility or community. They come from immense rich-girl privilege and seem incapable of acknowledging that.

They talk to each other with a patina of girl-power support, but are always two seconds away from catty epithets and soul-crushing put-downs. The way they speak about men is even worse, fixated on superficial looks, bank accounts and dick size. They’re shallow, petty, petulant people that, if you encountered in the real world, would quickly look to put some distance between.

I don’t think I’m a prude and can sling curse words with the best of them when motivated. But I think if I were to count up the number of times the f-word and “bitch” are uttered in this movie, they would account for something like 10% of all the dialogue.

OK, so their values and mine don’t align. As a film lover, I can get past all that if the movie gives them interesting things to do, challenges to overcome and some antagonists who have weight and malevolence. But the plot just plays out as repetitive: go to party, fun times begin, then some bad stuff happens, then the women start fighting about it, and eventually the jerks take off their masks and get rough.

There’s a line repeated several times by these heels: “Have a good night, ladies.” It’s uttered as a taunt, disparagement mixed with resentment. They have several encounters with the neighbor at the Airbnb (Chris Bauer), who keeps coming over to complain about the loud music and trash them as spoiled brats.

Problem is? That’s exactly what they are.

And when you can’t stand characters in a movie, the natural next step is feel good with awful things happen to them. I can’t say as I was rooting for the depraved men, but I sure as hell wasn’t empathizing with the women I was supposed to.

In trying to say something about toxic masculinity, “Find Your Friends” only amplifies the feminine version of it. It’d be overly harsh to say these women would be better off dead, but we’d all be better off for this movie never living.