Find Your Friends Review: A Girls Party Weekend Turns Scary

Taking a trip off the grid and partying with your friends has been a pastime for decades. However, for women, these trips can be a little more dangerous. Find Your Friends never shies away from the darkness of others, as it follows a group of young co-eds into the desert. While it plays with thriller tropes, drugged-out hallucinations, and the mental anguish living in fear can have on a person, its paranoia undeniably has real-world parallels. However, in the process, its messages get lost behind the party-hard attitudes of its characters.

What is Find Your Friends about?

During a day on a party boat, Amber (Helena Howard), Lola (Chloe Cherry), Zosia (Zión Moreno), Maddy (Sophia Ali), and Lavinia (Bella Thorne) want to have a good time. However, when Amber sees her ex-boyfriend with a new girl, she begins to spiral. After a few too many drinks and an unwanted sexual encounter, she acts out in front of the entire party.

To change their vibe and spend a fun week together, the five girls travel out to Joshua Tree for a getaway. While at a party, they run into some drug-sharing men, but when the girls prove uninterested in their advances, the men start to stalk them. As Amber continues to spiral, coming across as a paranoid bummer, her friends question whether the threats are real or if their friend is having a mental break.

Criticism

Find Your Friends comes from director Izabel Pakzad, who delivers her debut with a steady hand and confidence behind the camera. Throughout the thriller, Pakzad navigates tense moments and forces the audience into the awkward position of questioning her protagonist. There is more than enough evidence for us to believe that some of the men on screen are predators, but introducing the use of drugs and alcohol opens the door for an unreliable narrator. To double down on whether the audience should question Amber’s mental wellness, her own friends show frustration and fear. Find Your Friends captures a unique experience of trying to be a good person to your friends while wondering if they’re actually suffering a breakdown.

Pakzad accomplishes this through two methods. While the use of handheld cameras certainly adds to the chaos, the most alluring aspect of Find Your Friends is the non-stop music. The mix is so loud at times that Pakzad literally has side characters yell at our protagonists to turn it down. The near-constant state of pulsing bass and non-stop noise creates sensory overload. Adding bisexual lighting, brilliant reds, and strobe lighting to the camerawork further adds to the film’s otherworldly atmosphere.

Pakzad pushes us further into Amber’s isolation by literally dropping us in the desert. While she struggles to convey her fears and the sexual assaults she’s lived through, her friends continue to party. At first, Amber’s isolation is self-imposed through the use of subjective cameras, but as Find Your Friends progresses, we see it become literal as her crew slowly drifts away from her. During one drug-fueled sequence, Amber stumbles into the darkness and finds men who actively chase her further into her fears. Finding ways to balance the metaphorical loneliness many experience after an attempted rape with the literal distance in a never-ending desert is an effective storytelling tool for Pakzad.

Unfortunately, the narrative of Find Your Friends falls into some of the tropes of the rape-revenge story. The men are two-dimensional characters, which mostly favors our ability to learn about our core five characters. However, this does lead to simplified motivations. These figures absolutely exist in the world, but for male audiences, the near-mustache-twirling evil and toxic masculinity they showcase will allow some horror fans to write them off as exceptions. In this regard, Find Your Friends suffers from mere proximity to Obsession, where a more nuanced take is applied.

Additionally, Find Your Friends takes a long time to find its groove as a genre picture. This pacing could use some work in Pakzad’s future films. While many of the scenes are singular in their focus, either driving the narrative or giving us character beats, we need more of a balance to keep the story moving. The slow-burn approach will undeniably turn off some viewers.

However, the ensemble of Find Your Friends has no problem finding their roles and subverting them over the course of the film. Helena Howard has proven herself an exceptional actress with Madeline’s Madeline, and this just further adds to her growing résumé. She anchors the film emotionally, and when the time comes to step into the badass role, she does so without hesitation.

Bella Thorne gets some more depth than usual, and rather than using her as a gimmick actress (as the Scream TV series had), she actually steps into the “trainwreck” role with surprising depth. Moreno brings the most empathy to the screen, and as a result, gives us many of the film’s most lasting images. As a group, the girls are excellent, and we hope they team up again in the future.

Is Find Your Friends worth watching?

Yes, the thriller and drama aspects of Find Your Friends make this a pretty great option for the weekend. While some of the narrative could use more polish, the core five characters are enough to keep you engaged throughout. It’ll be curious to see where Pakzad goes with her next film and how many in this cast follow her. With the right screenplay and a little better pacing, you could easily see them building on their success.

Find Your Friends releases on Shudder on June 12, 2026.

Find Your Friends Review: A Girls Party Weekend Turns Scary