There’s a specfic kind of nostalgia that takes place when centering a movie around a mall in 2026. Most of them are dying, if not actively dead. Online shopping, delivery services, the almighty Amazon have steamrolled the brand centric indoor shopping centre as it once did to Main Street USA. But it feels right to hear Gen Z slang delivered by Gen Z actresses working in what most reflects an Urban Outfitters, even if it’s an experience that less of that generation are feeling.

Forbidden Fruits can most easily be summarized as The Craft for a new generation. It’s based off a stage play written by the film’s screenwriter Lily Houghton, and occasionally feels as contained as one imagines the stageplay was. Pumpkin, a new girl is looking for a better job at the mall, attempting to get in with the hippest clique that exists in the storefronts at a store calle Free Eden. When one of the chic floor workers finds out she’s named after a fruit, a prerequisite to being on the inside she is quickly admitted. So Pumpkin (Lola Tung), joins the group helmed by Apple (Lili Reinhart), Cherry (Victoria Pedretti), and Fig (Alexandra Shipp) to sell overpriced decore and clothing to rich influencers and Instagram moms.

The trappings of Forbidden Fruits are such that the power imbalance between Apple and Pumpkin is center stage. The goal of Apple is to have the power of middle management, and to use it to control her friend group in ways she deems fit. Pumpkin notices how this power is starting to rot the fruits and works to usurp her. Setting this battle that takes place over an assistant manger position at a retail boutique chain in a mall makes the absurdity all the better. The comedy of Forbidden Fruits is as dry as a prune. The dryness is compliemented well by the four leads. The self serious performances of Tung and Reinhart especially. Pedretti manages to steal a couple scenes as the ditzy one, and Shipp’s work as a girl trying to live a normal life within the confines of class rules dictated by Apple as queen bee.

Most witch stories wind up being cautionary tales. The VVitch, The Craft, even I Married a Witch all have a sense of morality at the heart of them. Forbidden Fruits is a story about the dangers of chasing a corporate ladder, and the ways in which one can lose themselves in that quest. Each of the fruits, Pumpkin, Apple, Fig, Cherry, and especially Pickle sacrifice a bit of themselves to give their hours away to a store that does not cherish them the way they cherish it. But it’s not them practicing witchcraft that is the heart of their missteps. It’s thinking that any sacrifice they make for Free Eden would be returend in kind.

3.5/