Find Your Friends
An apparently banal “girls’ trip”: Amber and her four friends leave the bubble of Los Angeles for a weekend in the Joshua Tree desert, ready to get drunk, flirt, and let go. But, as in many modern parables, behind the glossy façade of fun lies an abyss: despite their beauty, some environments reject them, because not all — in fact one in particular — plays along; their party is not welcomed, and the atmosphere becomes increasingly hostile, both physically and psychologically. Friends turn into strangers, the glamour of the nightlife cracks, and hidden traumas take shape. A latent tension, fueled by toxic dynamics and Amber’s painful past, erupts into revenge — and what was meant to be an escape turns into a nightmare with all the characteristics of a horror film.
The real high is feeling nothing at all, and that’s the problem.
— David Foster Wallace
— David Foster Wallace
Pakzad doesn’t simply capture a carefree getaway: she unmasks the superficial whirlpool of youth party culture — alcohol, sex, drugs — as a pure existential anesthetic. It’s as if the director were saying: “Hey, look, the party won’t save you; at best, it freezes you for a while.” The film digs beneath the fleeting beauty of hedonistic youth, revealing how the pursuit of the high is ultimately a form of escape: not only from responsibility, but — more painfully — from oneself. And it’s not an innocent escape, because within that lightness lies a loss of dignity: when partying becomes the only language, the body becomes a commodity, relationships slip through the void of accelerated consumption, and trauma creeps in like a silent predator.
The use of the Californian desert as a setting is no coincidence: it amplifies the existential solitude of these young women, the empty vastness into which their desires and traumas spill. It is a symbolic landscape, a metaphor for a soul seeking an elsewhere to flee from its own history, only to lose itself even more deeply. And while Pakzad boldly explores the sexual culture (and self-sexualization) of women in their twenties, she does not spare her critique of patriarchy: the male threat is not only external, but internal, structural, like a poison seeping into the most “carefree” moments, ready to explode when the dullness of partying is no longer enough.
The film’s strength lies precisely here: it is not a mere thriller, nor a well-behaved feminist tale. It is a symbolic detonation — a harsh dialogue with violence, vulnerability, and rage. The horror element of the final act, with revenge bursting forth, is not gratuitous: it feels like the inevitable culmination of repressed tension, the extreme manifestation of a liberation that does not pass through virtue — but through chaos. Pakzad rejects the conventional “final girl.” Her protagonists are not innocent victims waiting to be saved, but women claiming power through disillusionment, ferocity, even blood.
And here comes an existential note: that ending, turning fully into horror, carries a potentially cathartic resonance for the feminine. It is a violent yet radical catharsis, a rewriting of the myths of trauma and salvation. For the masculine, however, it is far less certain to function in the same way. The men in the film, although central to the dynamics of oppression and confrontation, are not given the same inner space for transformation in their downfall or rebirth: their violence is a tool, not a destiny. For them, catharsis through chaos is more difficult, because the film does not seem interested in offering male redemption: blood is the price to be paid, not the path to salvation.
Ultimately, Find Your Friends is a severe and clear-eyed portrait of the superficiality of youthful hedonism, sexual consumerism, and ephemeral power relations. It is a call to look beyond the glitter and the beat, toward who we really are when the party quiets down. Pakzad constructs a disturbing echo: it is not only a matter of surviving the night, but of surviving the emptiness that courses through it.
No one realizes that some people expend a tremendous amount of energy merely to be normal.
— Albert Camus
— Albert Camus