If Fresh’s plot twist is a shot, then its opening credits are its chaser. They take about a half-hour to appear, and once they do they’re coming right after the movie has revealed its true conceit. It’s not quite the affable-enough romantic comedy it’d been posing as before that — a story about an unexpected romance between unlucky-in-love 20-something Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and the handsome doctor named Steve (Sebastian Stan) she meets cute over a bag of cotton-candy grapes in her local grocer’s produce aisle — but something like an Ann Rule novel put through a meat grinder.
After a couple of dates, Noa decides she likes and trusts Steve enough that when he proposes a weekend trip to a secret destination, thrilling spontaneity trumps the skepticism of her inner voice and that of her best friend Mollie (Jonica T. Gibbs). Her last few dates have gone so unbelievably badly, why not make the most of something good? But after taking a sip of the citrusy cocktail Steve palms her moments after they arrive at his palatial vacation home, boxed in by miles of Oregon wilderness, Noa realizes her friend and gut were onto something. There was another secret ingredient in the cocktail besides nectarine. When Noa awakens, her right wrist is chained to the wall of a creepily chic holding cell.
Because walking into Fresh mostly blind is, I think, one of the reasons it gripped me as well as it did, I won’t reveal exactly what Steve’s intentions are. Suffice it to say, though, they’re so grotesque that your first instinct is to think “he’s just messing with her,” because they may or may not involve meat-eating not of the animal variety. Writer Lauryn Kahn (best known for her work with Funny or Die) and director Mimi Cave have lots of fun making devilish, literal horror from the idea that dating can feel a little like putting yourself on the market not that differently from a slab of easily-discardable meat, inserting some sharp and painful observations about the humiliations of modern romance along the way.
The movie thankfully manages to stay consistently aslantly funny without accidentally undercutting the seriousness of the very-real horror in which Noa can’t believe she’s finding herself. Much of that balance rides on how skillfully Edgar-Jones, the 23-year-old up-and-comer I and many others loved on TV’s Normal People, telegraphs a mix of fear and bewilderment over her plight’s unusual absurdity. The early moment where she’s realizing in real-time the gravity of the situation is its own mini-masterclass, as is a later sequence where she’s having dinner with Steve to stay in his good graces and tries not to crumble while participating in fake banter and swallowing food that makes her want to hurl. Edgar-Jones keeps everything centered even when Stan’s otherwise superiorly sinister performance can go in a momentarily overbroad direction, like when he’s prancing around along to some cranked-up music in his kitchen, moments away from sawing through a hunk of meat with a girthy knife.
Because Fresh is steadily riveting in a way all well-constructed how-is-this-character-going-to-get-out-of-this thrillers are, and because Cave’s direction is so stylistically confident and astute (her visuals flit easily from sensuous to creepily predatory), you prioritize anxiety over what’s coming next over any dormant doubts. But you notice the shortfalls more once you shut the movie off and its anxiety-inducing effect loosens its grip on you. The characters are all, ultimately, gossamer-thin — a problem particularly aggravated for the supporting players, who are almost all people of color existing in the movie purely to have better common sense than a white heroine they spend virtually all their time either soothing or flat-out rescuing. And for a horror-comedy with a cannibalistic edge, the movie is surprisingly toothless in its horror. You never think to indulge the frightening question of whether Noa will survive all this, let alone mostly intact, even if you finally want her to.
Still, Fresh’s by-and-large effectiveness makes you interested in what Cave, making her directorial debut here, comes up with next. And its bloody reclamation of the “gimme a smile” request skeezy men so often throw at women, along with an amusing, last-minute deployment of a “U up?” text, probably won’t be improved on in a movie any time soon.
Peterson Reviews 