Parents' Guide to Find Your Friends

Somewhere between an overlong episode of Gossip Girl and a diluted riff on Bodies Bodies Bodies, this thriller never finds the nerve to be as sharp as it wants to be. Find Your Friends has a real idea at its core: women meeting male violence with violence of their own, refusing the burden of fixing or educating the men around them. But the idea needed a sturdier foundation than gore and hedonism, and the film never finds the wit or badassery that could have made these women feel dangerous rather than decorative. The bloody, dismemberment-heavy climax tracks logically but still feels unearned, missing the control that made Promising Young Woman land so hard. Loosely inspired by writer-director Izabel Pakzad's own experience, it plays more like a revenge fantasy than anything rooted in lived truth.

Helena Howard is the exception, pulling real feeling out of Amber's trauma while staying believable inside this world. Everyone else is a type, closer to the caricatures of Spring Breakers than to actual friends, and the film never explains what binds this group together. Chloe Cherry's distinct presence barely registers, swallowed by a script that treats its supporting cast as interchangeable. It moves fast enough to avoid feeling slow, but "derivative" is the word that sticks once the credits roll.