An Explosive Debut from Izabel Pakzad [Fantastic Fest 2025]

The biggest surprise of Fantastic Fest 2025 was Izabel Pakzad’s explosive rape-revenge slow burn, Find Your Friends. This nasty little nightmare about a group of party girls in their twenties is a simmering stew of toxic masculinity and feminine rage that joins the ranks of such films as Isabel Eklof’s Holiday and Natalie Leite’s M.F.A. It’s a film that burns low and slow until an explosive third act that screams in your face and frantically slashes a knife with no regard for anything but survival. 

Amber (a phenomenal Helena Howard) and her friends Lavinia (Bella Thorne), Zosia (Zión Moreno), Lola (Chloe Cherry), and Maddy (Sophia Ali) are a group of young, hot ladies in Los Angeles who love to get fucked up, hook up with boys, and party hop. But after a traumatic encounter at a yacht party, Amber (rightfully) loses it and gets their posse kicked out of the party. Amber’s behavior pisses everyone off (mostly because she isn’t forthcoming with why exactly she lost it), and it makes their trip to Joshua Tree all the more awkward as the group whispers about Amber while they smoke weed, rip shots, and do mushrooms.

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But between their delighted, drunken squeals and loud music, the ladies draw quite a bit of attention to themselves from the locals. Between angry, horny local men and group tensions on the rise, everything is primed to boil over in the baking hot desert sun. It’s a fascinating character study of young women in the 2020s that collides with a 1970s exploitation flick, which, for this writer, is a perfect combination. 

While this crew of hot LA girls is sure to grind the gears of certain viewers, they are truly the perfect encapsulation of the toxic female friendships of your twenties, when it’s all about partying and hooking up, with friends coming third. The selfishness on display is real, as is the deep love between these women; emotions are always high, and while it can be euphoric, it can also be disastrous. Their banter and descent into hell brought me back to a very real night from my 20s that, while not remotely this bloody or traumatic, was similarly transformative in the way that I never looked at myself or my friends the same way again. And there’s something deeply powerful about a film that can make those memories resurface, even after almost a decade of being buried away, deep in my bruised subconscious.  

Howard, who stunned the world with her performances in Madeline’s Madeline, once again stuns as the untethered, traumatized Amber who stumbles through the drug-fueled days in a haze of pills and fury. Howard embodies that mindset with an all-too-familiar pain, one that you try to mask with as many substances as possible. But they only make the pain worse, and Howard’s descent into revenge-fueled madness feels deeply relatable. 

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The film’s dizzying cinematography by Tim Curtin matches a narrative where the viewer is thrown into the cocaine-covered deep end and trusted to catch up. Thankfully, Pakzad’s script and dialogue (delivered beautifully by the film’s stars) provide enough breadcrumbs to make sure no one ever feels lost. But in her focus on the female characters and their dynamics, Pakzad does lose focus on the more terrifying elements (read: the horny locals out for blood). They feel like an afterthought rather than a central threat, which holds Find Your Friends back from feeling truly scary.

Find Your Friends is a stunning debut for Pakzad that knocks the wind right out of your lungs. Its chaotic cinematography and life-like central performances help create an incredibly lived-in world that speaks to not only navigating womanhood, but also navigating a world that actively hates women. These women are messy, selfish, and deeply relatable in their early-twenties selfishness. Pakzad’s honesty about female friendships ensures the film’s end packs one helluva punch that spits in the face of patriarchy. 

Tags: Fantastic Fest

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