Forbidden Fruits: The Summer I Turned Witchy | SXSW 2026

I don't think it’s off to say that, since this decade started, we've been on a noughties nostalgia trip, culturally. And a girly cinema revival period, especially. Recapturing the spirit of the late 90s to the 2000s, an era pockmarked with high gloss films that made a space for female filmmakers to thrive, exploring what it meant to be a young woman in a limited world, a subgenre of existence rarely, if ever, taken seriously. Our recent crop of them has been camp-tastic so far, and all the more intentional than their foremothers in honing in on and excoriating the fakery we want to escape: Do Revenge, Bodies Bodies Bodies, and taking new form with Forbidden Fruits, Meredith Alloway’s witchy takedown of pop feminism that’s light as a feather and sharper than a stiletto heel.

Free Eden employees Apple (Lili Reinhert), Cherry (Victoria Pedretti), and Fig (Alexandra Shipp) are basically mall royalty, who, after closing hours, run a coven in the store’s basement, a sequined paradise where the vibes are just right and the rules strict and stringent. All is well—except for their pesky manager Sharon (Gabrielle Union) poking in their business—and Apple’s reign #blessed and unchallenged until new hire Pumpkin (Lola Tung) shakes up their sisterhood, forcing them to face their darkness or let it consume them. Mean Girls meets The Craft is a common logline, and though it's applicable, Forbidden Fruits is giving more Jawbreaker with how violently it skewers its subject matter, Alloway and screenwriter Lily Houghton asking how much cruelty we'll file as "solidarity” if it's couched in enough glittery talking points. 

Here is a film armed with a flair for dark comedy that really readily examines the co-opting of political movements, defanged from their politics, by petty despots, or rather, bored mall thots with dark pasts and too much time on their hands. Houghton’s script, based on her 2019 play Of the woman came the beginning of sin, and through her we all die, plies a theatrical intimacy for the toxic women at its core but it heightens it through the prowess of Karim Hussain’s images: jewel toned, well-lit, obscured in shadow yet it's also somehow sunburnt by fluorescent lights, all the while the semi-slasher is bottled in a single location.

These Free Eden witches are externally beautiful and internally rotten as the bubble they inhabit—shaped around the rotted state of mall culture in America, dead and dying. Reinhart, in top Dark Betty form, trading the black bob for a malicious shade of honeycrisp red, is so at home playing a bitch, seeming one note at first, but the cracks in her facade split open to reveal a woman trapped in chasing after agency with no understanding of how to get it. Tung surprises me too in her first horror role, in full bloom now that she's away from those awful, annoying brothers in Cousins, a foil to Reinhart’s toxicity who still matches her beat for beat as a force, not to be underestimated. Shipp is stuck with more of a peacekeeper role, so she doesn't get to go off as much, but gets a share of the film’s funniest lines, where Pedretti shines as the movie’s most realized and tragic character, whose baby-voice sycophancy devolves into an alcohol-fueled nervous breakdown.

Forbidden Fruits is a slow thing to blossom, but if you’re able to get on its wavelength, the rewards are swift and so fruitful. Sweet and then sour, this toxic poison kiss of a movie takes pleasure in venom to playfully dissect the plastic politics women box each other in. What is empowerment? Who gets to have it? Wield it? How can you even be sure that this basement paradise is real? Or if you're just trading patriarchy for its hungry little sister, ripping the heads off of her dolls? These are the questions Alloway and Houghton answer with blood, guts, and devil’s food cake, the desire to belong bludgeoned to death and its corpse revived, defied, and deified. Campy. Vampy. Vicious. Incredibly fun. Attention shoppers: the retail cycle is complete!