Chicks

The scouts

Takes the sleepover movie—that most saccharine of premises—and detonates it from the inside with a ritual that feels genuinely unsettling; the fact that it's wrapped in cotton-candy aesthetics makes the subversion sharper, meaner, and exactly the kind of tonal ambush that makes consensus critics deeply uncomfortable.

Hernandez demonstrates formal control in her color palette and sound design, positioning the film within a lineage of body-horror and coming-of-age cinema that interrogates female friendship, though the surrealism occasionally outpaces the dramatic architecture it's meant to serve.

The pivot from bubblegum comedy to something genuinely menacing hinges on a single performance choice—the shy teen's dawning realization plays almost wordlessly, and that restraint against the chaos around her is what sells the entire premise.