Find Your Friends. Image: Shudder
Find Your Friends is a chilling story about five young women whose girl’s trip to Joshua Trip turns into a nightmare. The movie was written and directed by Izabel Pakzad.
Here’s everything we know about Find Your Friends.
Find Your Friends release date
The movie is available to stream June 12 on Shudder.
Shudder, a horror streaming platform, is available as a standalone subscription. It can also be purchased as part of a bundle with AMC+.
What is Find Your Friends about?
Here’s the synopsis from Shudder:
“Amber and her four best friends flee Los Angeles for a girls’ trip in Joshua Tree, only to find themselves unwelcome in a desert town simmering with quiet hostility. As isolation sets in and encounters with aggressive locals grow more threatening, festering resentments within the group begin to surface. What begins as fun and reckless escape spirals into a violent struggle for control and survival, as past wounds and present dangers collide in a night that turns their trip into a revenge-fueled nightmare.”
Who is in it?
Find Your Friends features Bella Thorne (Dirty Sexy Money) as Lavinia, Chloe Cherry (Euphoria) as Lola, Helena Howard (The Wilds) as Amber, Zion Moreno (Corporate Retreat) as Zosia and Sophia Ali (The Wilds) as Maddy.
Who is the director?
Izabel Pakzad not only wrote the screenplay, she’s also making her feature film directorial debut with Find Your Friends. Here’s more information from her bio:
“Izabel Pakzad is an Iranian-Greek American filmmaker, writer, and actor. Her short film Don’t Worry, It’s Gonna Be OK (2022), which she directed, wrote and starred in, was an official selection at the Oscar-qualifying Raindance Film Festival and Hollyshorts, and also won Best Short Film at the L.A. Film Festival. Previously, Pakzad produced and starred in the independent feature, Thena, opposite Chris Bauer, Virginia Gardner (Fall), Brian Marc (White Girl) Will Peltz (Euphoria), Dakotas Lotus (Cami and Coop), and Malia Baker (The Baby-Sitters Club). Thena had its world premiere at Taormina Film Festival in June 2025.”
Pakzad also released the following statement about Find Her Friends:
I had the idea to write a thriller set in Joshua Tree after my own real-life experience of being harassed
and then chased by a group of men when I was there with my best friends. It was terrifying, and the
experience really rattled me – it forced me to confront just how exposed I am as a woman in certain
situations. This experience inspired me to dig deeper, and in writing this script, I saw the story as an
opportunity to explore feminism and the patriarchy in an honest, brutal, and unflinching way.
The women at the heart of this story, especially Amber, are trying to ignore their own traumas, escaping into an endless party. While Amber starts to wake up from this trance, the others find it easier to party on—because, for them, it’s the only escape they know. I can personally relate to this; I was once wrapped up in this party culture, feeling lost and directionless. Sometimes, partying felt like the only way to numb the weight of everything. But as the party intensifies, it slowly transforms into an inescapable nightmare. When the women suddenly become more vulnerable, the situation escalates and makes their realities impossible to ignore… it all becomes too much. And they go absolutely feral.
It’s important to mention that these characters are confronting this party culture that raised them. While they navigate their complicated friendships and differing perspectives on their relationships with men and sex, they do so in a raw, unapologetically wild way—traits rarely given space for female characters in film.
I love genre films so much, but the final girl trope has always frustrated me—this insistence that women
must be sweet and innocent to earn survival. Find Your Friends rejects that entirely. My characters are
vulgar, wild, and sexually empowered without consequence. They reclaim their power through violence
and chaos rather than virtue. Young women in cinema are rarely allowed this kind of raw complexity
without punishment. With this film, I’m not just challenging the final girl—I’m completely reinventing
what she can be.
