“Meat market” takes on disturbing new meaning in the dating-is-hell thriller Fresh
Daisy Edgar-Jones and Sebastian Stan star in a cutting horror satire about modern romance
Film Reviews Fresh
In June of 1978, Hustler made light of criticisms from second-wave feminists that the magazine reduced women to little more than parts by collaging a pair of female legs into a meat grinder. The new horror satire Fresh flips that script. Writer Lauryn Kahn and director Mimi Cave take a bleak view of dating in the age of apps, skewering the sexual and emotional entitlement of straight men with a bluntness akin to that of Larry Flynt and company. Both the movie and the magazine take the idea of sex and dating as a “meat market” literally. The difference here is that now it’s the meat’s turn to tell the tale.
Normal People’s Daisy Edgar-Jones stars as Noa, a twentysomething living in the Pacific Northwest who’s about to give up on dating entirely when she meets doctor Steve (Sebastian Stan) in the produce aisle on a late-night grocery run. Steve is flirtatious and handsome, and against her better judgement, Noa gives this total stranger her phone number. At first, it seems like her gamble has paid off. She’s finally met a man who listens and doesn’t mind paying for dinner—and in the real world, no less! So Noa ignores the warnings of her best friend, Mollie (Jojo T. Gibbs), and agrees to go on a weekend getaway with her new beau. One drugged cocktail later, she wakes up chained to the wall in Steve’s tastefully decorated midcentury modern home.
Fresh waits a whole 33 minutes to roll its opening credits sequence, right as the movie veers in a completely different direction. The cornball rom-com elements of Steve and Noa’s courtship take on an ironic new resonance, rendered sinister by context like a pop song in the trailer for a horror movie. To that end, Stan’s performance remains frighteningly consistent; what once read as charming banter now comes across like the shallow affect of a sociopath.
As Noa tries to figure out how she’s going to get out of the handcuffs and away from this house of horrors, Fresh widens its scope to explore different angles on its core theme. Initially seeming to fill the role of a clichéd “Black best friend” character, Mollie rises to co-lead position as she follows her gut and starts searching for Noa. Her journey into the dark heart of the suburbs to find the truth behind the Blue Lives Matter flags adds an immediacy to a film that’s otherwise very much playing the long game. And once the full scope of Steve’s depravity is revealed, Fresh offers up its most disturbing commentary yet, meditating on how patriarchal relationship dynamics chew women up and spit them back out. No pun intended.
The comedy is more hit or miss. Some of the jokes have a dry, sarcastic quality that evolves along with the film. (A running gag about telling women to smile pays off in spectacularly bloody fashion, for example.) But others spoil the mood by tipping too far into silliness. Take Cave pausing the movie every once in a while for a montage of Stan dancing to ’80s pop tunes. The performance is already conveying everything we need to know about the character’s lack of emotion and remorse. The jarring tonal shift by way of ironic needle drop is unnecessary—especially in a movie that’s already pushing two hours.
When Cave applies her decadent instincts towards squirming disgust, the results are more effective. Closeups of mouths throughout the film escalate from sensual to repellant. And Cave makes queasy use of soft focus and handheld camerawork in moments when Noa’s head is spinning, whether from lust or Rohypnol. Despite its bolder choices, however, Fresh doesn’t push the body horror as far as it could, and works better as an empowerment fable than as an actual thriller. But maybe that’s for the best. Why make dating look scarier? All those unsolicited dick pics are stressful enough.
30 Comments
This seems like such a low blow to Armie Hammer.
Meat’s meat, and man’s gotta eat.- Farmer Vincent
“Oh, but making a whole fucking MOVIE about it is okay!”- A. Hammer
So this is like You, only instead of falling in love with a baker the psycho-date bakes his lover?
“charming banter now comes across like the shallow affect of a sociopath.”Well yeah it’s the same thing.Funny that the review opens with a comment about women being treated as body parts and then ends on a note about it happening to men. Wonder if the comparison is intended.
Good review sounds like a great date movie tbh.
It was intended! Ty for noticing.
Oh cool thank you for confirming! Looking forward to this one.
Good use of “Heads will Roll” in the trailer. And I buy Stan a whole lot more as a psycho doctor than as Tommy Lee.
Take Cave pausing the movie every once in a while for a montage of Stan dancing to ’80s pop tunes.Since we’ve seen this in Silence of the Lambs, American Psycho, Ted and probably others I’m forgetting – I think this bit is now beyond tired and directors need to let it go. It’s no longer creepy, funny or interesting.
At least Mads Mikkelsen as Hannibal had class
And how!
this sounds fun and stan has some real psycho eyes. looking forward to this.
Stan hasn’t had much chance to bring out this side of him since KINGS was cancelled.
Daisy Edgar-Jones struggling to get a boyfriend? Sure.
I imagine more like struggling to wade through the dross. And fair enough.
114 minutes? Come now people horror is a genre of brevity
it blew by, so good
“…the sexual and emotional entitlement of straight men…”(Stated as though inherent to the species with the nonchalant, baseless confidence of an utter hack, in the antithesis of a surprise)
Like iZombie without the zingers.
“Fresh” is awful…er, offal? The horror tropes announce themselves way ahead and too obviously, making for some predictable events and dialogue (the last two lines especially). Also, the logic of physiology and repercussion/recovery from medical procedures take a back seat to plot – (Spoiler: why/how else would Noa be able to dance so well so quickly, or Mollie be able to throw such punches when the major muscle groups for these actions need to be there?) This movie doesn’t know if it’s horror, torture porn, or “clever comment” on dating, and is without suspense. “Titane” did it so much better, funnier, weirder, and with actual suspense. So did “Raw.”
Yeah, they definitely never showed anything after Noa’s body part removal that led me to believe a body part removal had ever happened. It was really strange. (Seems like it would’ve come up during the dancing and sex.) I could understand in the final act how adrenaline allowed unlikely things to occur, but in general none of the woman looked like much had happened yet. Penny in particular was a little floppy but seemed 100% intact.
Exactly. For a minute I wondered if we were in unreliable narrator territory and it was being imagined, a la Boxing Helena. No, just poor storytelling.
I thought the same thing, but I just rolled with it.
I do wonder how the ladies get away when ponytail guy is still on the property somewhere.
And the trailers certainly imply that it’s a horror movie (although I guess they were in a bit of a bind: releasing trailers portraying this as a rom com wouldn’t have gone over well.)
“Her journey into the dark heart of the suburbs to find the truth behind the Blue Lives Matter flags adds an immediacy to a film that’s otherwise very much playing the long game. And once the full scope of Steve’s depravity is revealed, Fresh offers up its most disturbing commentary yet, meditating on how patriarchal relationship dynamics chew women up and spit them back out.”I must have missed this movie, because the one I saw, while enjoyable creepy and weird, was not quite intellectually as deep as this reviewer seemed to believe. I also don’t know how the BLM stuff applies. Like, at all. Did they show a flag somewhere that I missed, too? Or is it because the actress is black, so it HAS TO BE implied that there’s a racial angle, too? Because, again, didn’t see that one anywhere.
I agree about the music montages. I generally had fun, and didn’t even mind those little excursions in theory but had to cut my volume fully in half. Watching it in a movie theater would’ve been excruciating. I understand the very overused technique exists, but I don’t have any clue why.
It kind of sounds like a feminist response to Jordan Peele’s Get Out?Is it as effective as that movie was?
“Fresh waits a whole 33 minutes to roll its opening credits sequence”That is WILD man
meditating on how patriarchal relationship dynamics chew women up and spit them back out.I mean… wow. This is an actual take. Methinks thow looketh too deeply into the cheap horror movie, Katie.
yummy – i liked it!