Find Your Friends
Directed by Izabel Pakzad · Helena Howard, Bella Thorne, Zion Moreno
Horror Thriller · 2026-06-12
“A desert revenge thriller with a real wound at its center and no steady idea what to do with it.”
Find Your Friends is the feature debut of writer director Izabel Pakzad, built from her own experience of being harassed and chased on a desert road, and you can feel that the anger is real. That is the heartbreaking part. There is a genuine, personal injury powering this film, and the movie keeps tripping over it instead of aiming it. It landed on Shudder on June 12 and split critics straight down the middle, which is the worst place for a film with something to say to end up.
Some reviewers called it dreamy and feral with a taste for blood. Others called it one of the year's worst and most insufferable films. When the reactions land that far apart, it usually means the movie has powerful raw materials and a shaky grip on them. The desert setting is striking, the premise of five women hunted across Joshua Tree is primal, and the swing from girls trip to survival horror is the kind of move that earns either applause or a thrown drink.
The trouble with a revenge thriller is that it has to earn the revenge, and a debut feature carrying this much personal weight needed a steadier hand on the back half. The rage is authentic. The craft is still learning. That combination makes for a film that is impossible to dismiss and genuinely hard to recommend, which is a frustrating place for a first time director with this much to say.
- 01
The desert setting and the Joshua Tree landscape give the film a genuine, simmering sense of menace.
- 02
The personal anger behind the story gives it a charge most polite genre debuts never find.
- 03
The tonal swing from party film to survival horror is an ambitious, attention grabbing structure.
- 04
It flatly refuses to be polite about a real danger that women describe routinely.
- 01
Control over tone and pacing wobbles badly, especially across the back half.
- 02
The revenge payoff never fully earns its long buildup, which left many critics cold.
- 03
Characters outside the lead feel thin, so the stakes blur when they should sharpen.
- 04
The message and the execution spend the runtime pulling in different directions.
Genre fans who forgive rough edges when a horror film clearly has something personal and furious to say.
Viewers who want a tight, controlled thriller and have no patience for a debut that misses as often as it connects.
Shudder sold this on vibes and dread, which is honest enough, because the trailer's strongest asset is the landscape and the creeping sense that something is wrong. The risk is that dreamy and feral marketing sets up an art house mood, and then the brutal rape revenge content arrives and the crowd that showed up for atmosphere feels ambushed.
Your website, CV, or whatever you made. I'll roast that too.
A full teardown from €2,99. No mercy.