Fresh

dir: Mimi Cave

2022

This film from last year called Fresh is not to be confused with the great film directed by Boaz Yakin in the 1990s called Fresh about a 12-year-old chess playing prodigy and drug dealer just trying to get by in the world.

No, this has less cross-cultural social commentary, and more of a contemporary “what’s up with dating in this app driven day and age, huh?” feel to it.

The first exact 33 minutes of this flick are one kind of film. It’s the purest form of rom com. A young woman called Noa, for some reason (Daisy Edgar-Jones), sickened by and disappointed as well by the men she meets through dating apps, has a chance encounter with a chap in the fresh food section of a supermarket. He’s a bit awkward and self-effacing, but kinda charming and doesn’t give off any creep vibes. She is taking a chance, she knows, but she finds it refreshing to connect with someone without the bullshit artificiality or outright lies of online dating.

She wants, like everyone wants, to skip that early part which goes on and on until the other person reveals themselves to be a complete jerk. Either show you’re a jerk upfront so she can bail, or be a decent person and maybe they can get to know each other?

Steve (Sebastian Stan) doesn’t trigger any red flags yet, but hey, that’s a red flag in and of itself, isn’t it? Doesn’t it just show that he’s crafted his game to the point where women don’t question his motives or wonder why he doesn’t seem to exist online? I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation. Maybe he just wants to opt out of the online madness / rat race that seems to depress so many people.

And he seems to be a handsome doctor you say? Reconstructive surgery you say?

Wow, and with that disarming smile and massive head of healthy hair?

No wonder Noa says “fuck it”, and decides to trust her gut, and go with what feels right.

When the opening title / credits come this late into a flick, it almost feels like a piss take of opening titles, like, well, if it comes this late into a film, did you even know what you were even watching? The grand champion of this that I saw mentioned in a review was the Japanese flick from the year before called Drive My Car, where the opening credits came like an hour into the flick. After an hour of watching a film (admittedly a 3 hour movie), seeing the titles is an assault, an affront, a rebuke, a reminder that you’re watching a movie, and that you’re being played, in a way.

But maybe it’s not all bad to be reminded that we’re watching a movie. We got sucked in just like Noa was.

We thought we knew what we were getting into. We just maybe didn’t know how fucked up things were going to get.

And we really should have. This takes about as dark a turn as a film can make and still pretend it’s doing a bit of social commentary, and that it’s using a comedic, deft touch to prevent it from descending into abject sadistic horror. I mean, it’s still horror; it’s a fucking horrific concept, but this is a two hour film, and we need something to sustain us for that hour and a half that comes after that initial rom com framing.

After Noa wakes up essentially in a dungeon, we find out that Steve and his shit eating grin really have an entirely other agenda when it comes to Noa, and other women like Noa – ones who have moved to wherever they were pretending this was, which most likely means it was made in Canada but set in LA, maybe? Steve selects women like Noa, without immediate family, puts them in a veal pen, and then pretty much cuts pieces off of them until he’s done with them.

He caters to a select and exclusive clientele who are more than happy to pay an absolute fortune for human flesh. But of course these men, these obscene and obscenely wealthy men, only eat women, only eat women like Noa. Steve himself isn’t just catering to the desires of others – he himself other than obviously being a serial killer is also a cannibal. And he likes dancing and working out to 80s songs, so you know he’s an absolute monster, very much in the Patrick Bateman / American Psycho mould.

The “funny” thing is Steve’s demeanour mostly doesn’t change from the early scenes into the later scenes – he seems to fundamentally be the same person, casually self-assured, not at all worried about whether he’s ever going to be found out or get his comeuppance. I mean, they never see it coming, which makes us yearn for it even more.

Noa, who is powerless for most of the film, whether she attempts to make escapes or not, waits patiently. She’s not only waiting for the moment to fuck him up – she’s waiting until she can convince Steve that whatever lingering attraction he may have for her beyond how much her body parts might fetch on the open market is justified.

It is such a complicated balancing act. I don’t even know exactly how she pulls it off so convincingly, and the ridiculous thing is that it has to follow the poisonous parameters of what traditionally used to be called “courtship rituals”. Despite the fact that he is clearly a psychopath, there are levels upon which even he can be fooled.

Not only does Noa get “dating” tips from a women’s magazine, she also gets a message from some poor unfortunate prior resident of the cell; a girl called Sami, who leaves the secret message betwixt the printed paragraphs that if someone’s reading her message, then Steve likes the reader enough to keep them alive, so they’ve got a chance. And she wishes them strength, despite clearly not being around anymore. Brave Sami, rest in power.

This gives some small measure of hope to Noa, which is why it’s such a double-edged moment to watch Noa practice her smiling.

Despite Steve selecting Noa for the fact that she seems so alone, she is not alone in this world. She has a dear friend Mollie (Jo Jo T. Gibbs) who is warning her to be more cautious right from the start, and of course is ignored. She knows something is wrong, and graduates somewhat from the dubious position of “(white) protagonist’s best (black) friend to “maybe could she save her friend’s life even?” She conducts an investigation that would put most actual detectives to shame, and she also manages a particular exasperated smile when different people advise her, an African-American woman, to go to the cops with her suspicions.

Mollie doesn’t know the extent of the horror that Noa is embroiled in, just that her friend is missing. So when she turns up to “Steve’s” house, the one he shares with his wife (Charlotte Le Bon) and kids, well, who knows what’s going to happen? And is it relevant that this wife seems to be missing a leg?

It’s a long, slow burn to get to where Noa needs to be in order to enact her strategy for survival, escape and revenge. It’s the long game that she’s playing, and there’s a feeling like it has to be earned. I will not for a second say that I was in any way bored, but it felt like a bit of a stretch to get there. Maybe it was just the anticipation lasting too long for the tasty treats to be served up at the end.

And by tasty treats, I am not talking about the fact that Noa has to pretend to be on board with Steve and his lifestyle choices by saying that she’s “curious” about what it tastes like. We know it’s part of the act, but good goddamn is it hard to watch. Like, obviously we’re meant to be horrified at the idea, but if anything films like this double as an argument against the consumption of any meat, human or otherwise. The macabre, disturbing, horrifying depictions of human butchery makes all butchery seem evil, an idea I’m sure that does not come as any surprise to the filmmakers.

When glorious comeuppance comes, when the possibility of freedom comes, it has to be hard earned, hard fought and deliciously ironic. She has to do to him what he’s been doing to too many for far too long. But Noa’s not going to leave any body behind!

I almost feel bad saying that I enjoyed Fresh so completely and so thoroughly. It feels fundamentally wrong to “enjoy” any film that’s about a level of misogyny so profound that it involves dismembering living women, and feeding a market that has such a profound hatred of women, but pairs that with the casual misogyny women deal with through something as basic as dating.

Now, I’m not saying that the film is saying that the same kind of mentality that would reflexively send a dick pick to a woman after one line of communication, or that would hurl abuse at a woman for not wanting to smile or be kissed is the same kind of mentality that would murder and eat women for fun and profit, but I’m not not saying that either

Daisy Edgar-Jones and Sebastian Stan do such great work together, grounding what would otherwise be such a silly or profoundly ugly endeavour. Even when the film seems like it’s trying ever so hard to create what would end up being viral moments on TikTok with some of the dance sequences, they play a crucial role in depicting how torturous, how dehumanising many of our dating rituals are, how necessary to our survival in other circumstances.

They’re both game, and they really make their characters sing, despite the fact that, you know, Steve is a despicable fucking monster.

Really strong film. I wish I’d seen it earlier in the year. Makes a perfect double bill with The Menu. Or perhaps a second course.

Fresh. Definitely not to be watched by the squeamish as a date movie. Or vegetarians, which amounts to the same thing, really, let’s be honest.

8 times I still think it’s a bit of a flawed business model to kidnap and dismember women who are like size 2s, regardless of the ethical / moral / legal implications out of 10

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“ It's about giving. Giving yourself over to somebody. Becoming one with somebody else, forever. And that's... That's a beautiful thing. That's surrender. That's love.” - Fresh