Witchcraft, retail, and the chaos of staying true to yourself.
Meredith Alloway has a clear fascination with constructed realities. Her previous short work often examined the facades people build, the performance of identity in spaces designed to contain them. She looks for the tension where a character’s inner world grinds against an outer one that expects compliance.
With Forbidden Fruits, she moves that examination to a familiar but decaying American institution: the suburban shopping mall.
Alloway adapts Lily Houghton’s stage play with a sharp eye for how retail architecture tries to shape behavior. The setting is the Highland Place mall in Dallas, a liminal space where fluorescent lights and curated storefronts create a false sense of order. It is here that three young women—Apple, Fig, and Cherry—have established their own sovereignty. They work at the Free Eden boutique, a gig that requires more than selling clothes. It demands adherence to a rigid code of conduct: controlled communication with men, scheduled intimacy, and a carefully managed public image.
The film asks a messy question. What happens when the system a woman builds to protect herself from the patriarchy starts to feel like a different kind of cage?
Alloway is not interested in easy answers. She populates this mall ecosystem with characters who wield power but do not always know what to do with it. The arrival of Pumpkin, a newcomer from the food court with zero interest in bowing to the mall’s established hierarchy, disrupts the fragile equilibrium. What follows is a sly, sardonic exploration of girl power’s contradictions.
The director understands that strength found in community can also curdle into control. Forbidden Fruits uses the trappings of a horror comedy—hexes, bloodletting, escalator accidents—to stage a deeper argument about the difficulty of self-actualization when you are constantly performing for an audience. This is the framework for the review that follows.
Free Eden employee Apple secretly runs a witchy femme cult in the basement of a mall store after hours. When a new hire challenges their performative sisterhood, the women are forced to face their own poisons or succumb to a bloody fate.
Release date 27 March 2026 (USA)
Director Meredith Alloway
Producers Diablo Cody, Mary Anne Waterhouse, Mason Novick, Trent Hubbard
Forbidden Fruits Review: Mall Culture Meets Coven Chaos
A Horror Movie by George Wolf
Just a few minutes into Forbidden Fruits, it’s clear that Apple (Lili Reinhart) has created a living space that does not bow to the patriarchy – at the local mall or anywhere else.
Apple, Fig (Alexandra Shipp), and Cherry (Victoria Pedretti) are the Queens of the Highland Place mall in Dallas, and the awestruck whispers we hear as they walk in tell us much about the kind of power the “Fruits” enjoy.
Reporting to an unseen manager named Sharon (stay late for an important reveal), the ladies work the floor at the Free Eden boutique, fleecing customers into big dollar buys, worshipping Marilyn Monroe and adhering to a strict regimen that includes sex on a schedule and communicating with boys only through emojis.
Also…there are hexes and spells when needed. So, all seems good with this coven as a trio. Until Pumpkin (Lola Tung from “The Summer I Turned Pretty”) strolls in from that pretzel place in the food court.
Pumpkin is unintimidated by the Fruits, confidently telling Apple, “My job doesn’t define me, my hotness and personality do.”
That’s just one of many priceless lines, and writer/director Meredith Alloway’s adaptation of Lily Houghton’s stage play becomes a sharp, sly and sardonic treat, spilling the beans (and the blood!) about the chaos and contradictions of trying to stay true to yourself.
All four actresses are terrific, carving out distinct identities that keep various secrets on simmer. Is Cherry really that much of an empty-headed vessel? Does Fig have aspirations beyond Highland Place? And what’s the real truth about the death of Apple’s abusive Dad (“R.I. – but not P!”)
Tung makes it fun to guess Pumpkin’s true motives for joining the Fruits, and Alloway crafts an engaging ecosystem of complex girl power. The limited setting of the play never feels claustrophobic, and the mashup of storefronts, costuming and technology creates an anachronistic callback to the glory days of mall society.
Alloway does take her time getting to the bloodletting, but leans in pretty hard with some fun practical magic once it does hit. Remember those warnings about getting caught in escalators? Ouch!
But the real delight here is how the film utilizes a horror device derived from the fear of a women’s power to discuss how messy and imperfect the path toward self-actualization can be. There is strength in community, but danger when – as Cherry points out – you forget Shine Theory and “ruin my glow!”
These are definitely some hot topics for a day at the mall. But in the world of Forbidden Fruits, digging into them is even more fun than sorting through the blacklight posters at Spencer’s.
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