Panic Fest: Find Your Friends is a joyless collage of better revenge movies
Courtesy Panic Fest
Panic Fest 2026 just wrapped up at Screenland Armour in KC. The yearly homegrown genre festival is a delightful cavalcade of feature films hitting theaters soon, and some with releases further down the road. Read all of our coverage of these debuts.
Since her first film role in the 2018 Josephine Decker film Madeline’s Madeline, Helena Howard has been a commanding presence onscreen. It feels trite to call someone a unique beauty, but if there’s anyone that the descriptor applies to, it’s her. Howard’s eyes, in particular, are ultra expressive, always communicating the sense that she’s thinking more than she’s saying. That otherworldly sense has made her an emerging MVP for experimental and genre films like Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow and fellow 2026 Panic Fest entry The Red Mask.
Howard is easily the strongest element of the tonally messy Find Your Friends, a desert thriller about a group of hard-partying college girls who are both the victims and dealers of serious physical and mental trauma over a weekend in Joshua Tree.
Writer-director Izabel Pakzad’s movie careens through influences ranging from Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge to Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman to Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! with no clear command of the core vibes or concepts that make those films work.
Pakzad also never makes the case that her film has much of its own to add to the conversation. Howard’s steady lead performance is the thin thread that keeps it all from being totally unwatchable.
We meet Howard’s Amber at a yacht party that feels like it’s straight out of an MTV Spring Break of yore, alongside her friends Lavinia (Bella Thorne), Maddy (Sophia Ali), Zosia (Zión Moreno) and Lola (Chloe Cherry). In the midst of all the booze and drug-fueled hedonism, Amber is sexually assaulted by a douchey guy. Her resulting shock and anxiety harshes the vibe for her shallow buddies as they drive out to the desert for a weekend of further partying that goes bad real fast.
Are Amber’s heightened fear and unprocessed trauma (and also the club drugs her girlfriends keep pushing on her) causing her to see danger around every corner, or do the violent local dudes really have it out for these ladies?
Between their club outfits, near-constant drinking, and propensity for desert-based shenanigans gone horribly wrong, Amber and her friends feel like versions of Revenge’s Jen, but without her unexpected survival instincts or impressive battle scars. They have (or at least Amber has) the bloodlust of Promising Young Woman’s Cassandra, but without her intelligence or sense of justice.
By the final scenes, Find Your Friends has arguably entered Russ Meyer gleeful sleaze territory, but without any of the associated campy fun; its style of violence feels more akin to early 2000s torture porn.
The movie’s payoff, such as it is, is preceded by about 70 minutes of what could be a PSA for either mental health or the dangers of drugs (or both). Credit where it’s due, Howard does an excellent job of portraying the way unaddressed anxiety slowly grows, exacerbated through repeated assertions of “I’m fine” until it finally explodes. Amber is a pitch-perfect portrayal of what not to do, and her friends embody exactly what every anxiety sufferer fears will happen when they’re vulnerable about their state of mind.
Howard’s magnetism aside, everything in Find Your Friends feels like a weak pastiche of elements pulled off better in other films, by filmmakers who actually had something to say. Pakzad’s movie doesn’t know where it wants to land either tonally or thematically, taking far too long to get to its revenge plot and wasting any tension it builds (which, at 89 minutes, is saying something).
Would marathoning the movies that influenced this one take longer? Sure, but you’ll almost certainly have a better time.
