![]() ![]() ![]() To put it crudely, Steve is a cartoon villain with bite. Noa’s captor, Steve (Sebastian Stan), has a consuming passion so gross that you should be laughing, but the urge is stifled by Cave’s directing style and tone and its eerily cool and weirdly elegant understanding of the mechanics of horror. For those who like their dating movies with a bit of gristle, Fresh is a perfect match.Like Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, Fresh is a feminist satire about the callous exploitation of women’s bodies, but writer Lauryn Kahn and director Mimi Cave pitch their theme at such a visceral level that satire veers uncomfortably into torture porn. If the frenzied last act makes a few missteps (some decisions are a little questionable, Gibbs disappears for a little too long and one of the final quips is awkwardly on-the-nose), it’s all so thrillingly edge-of-seat that such quibbles are forgiven. She sells every gruelling beat and her hot-and-cold chemistry with Stan, leaning into his dark side well, is one of the film’s major sources of propulsion. She plays Noa as many women have to play themselves on the scene: vulnerable to not seem too standoffish to men craving someone to take care of but with enough steel to protect herself if needed. She’s a deft orchestrator of suspense (expect any wise studio exec to be pestering her agent with calls immediately) but she also wants us to be part of it rather than watching at a distance and so using Edgar-Jones, a warm and empathetic yet spiky actor, is a masterstroke. Fresh makes its point without feeling the need to bludgeon us in the process.Ĭave, best known for her music video work, keeps us in the moment without drowning us in poppy, over-styled otherness. There’s a similar war being fought here, between violent masculinity and the women trying to survive it, but there’s more to say than just: everyone is the worst. ![]() It’s a brutal snapshot but Kahn avoids disappearing into the but-what-next gloom of Promising Young Woman, which left us lost in hopelessness. For many of us, and especially for women, dating apps and dating culture can be violently revealing, exposing people’s worst impulses and most selfish desires, and the film takes particular issue with how women’s bodies are judged, shared and abused. Because such in-your-face exposure makes sense here. What might be a little harder to stomach for some though is just how queasily grotesque parts of the film are, whether we see the gore up close or not, but there’s something fitting about just how unapologetically gnarly it all is. Kahn doesn’t take short cuts with her characters who, for the most part, avoid easily written yet hard-to-stomach behaviour. So when terrible things happen, we’re not dealing with just a surface wound. While some of the plot details might skirt close to B-movie absurdity, Fresh exists in a real world with real people, rules and stakes. What screenwriter Lauryn Kahn and Cave realise is that first and foremost, this is a genre movie, and rather than waste time patting themselves on the back for making clumsy “but this is really about” commentary, they’re too busy trying to make our palms sweat and our pulses race. While Fresh can be easily filed a part of the boom in “social thrillers”, exploding post the extraordinary success of Jordan Peele’s Oscar-winning Get Out, it’s one of the few that manages to grip us without the use of a heavy hand. It would be a spoiler, I believe, to detail exactly what the big reveal is although Cave gives us ample warning signs: the title, the location of the initial meet, the references to food … the general nature of it isn’t a surprise but the specifics are, a bracingly nasty rug-pull detailed with chilling normality. The believable meet-cute first act takes place entirely, audaciously, before the opening credits, a sweet 30-minute romcom that quickly switches up to reveal something sour, like biting into a succulent peach that’s rotten on the inside. Before she has time to process, it’s lights out and that’s just the first in a series of nasty surprises. But after a few sips of an old-fashioned, Noa starts to feel woozy. Remote and expansive (“This is intimidating,” she remarks), she can’t believe her luck. Steve surprises her with a weekend away but first, with traffic shifting their journey to morning, she’ll get to see his place for the first time. They begin dating and while her best friend Molly (Jojo T Gibbs) is alarmed by his lack of social media presence – a red flag in the 2020s, surely? – Noa allows herself to slowly believe that maybe she’s finally getting what she deserves. When she meets Steve (Sebastian Stan) in the fresh produce aisle of the local supermarket, she’s caught off-guard by his charm, a handsome, keen and emotionally available stranger who talks as much as he listens. ![]()
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