Fresh
HULUFrustrations bubbling over dull dates and the conglomerate application of love, Fresh takes hold of defeatist attitudes and springs into life. What is love, anyway? Director Mimi Cave sets off on the horrifying road to answer that question with her feature debut, and she is in good company for it with Sebastian Stan and Daisy Edgar-Jones. Bad dates are common, but are they enough to push someone into a weird and wild ride after a meet-cute at a supermarket? Fresh dares to dream the old-fashioned way, of bumping into someone purchasing the same collard greens as one another and hitting it off from there. A relationship cannot be dependent on vegetables alone, but Fresh knows that. It makes it the core of its strange and simple premise.
Edgar-Jones makes for a superb lead. The bad manners of poor dates from the man, quite literally named Chad (Brett Dier), show all to the audience. It captures a frustration that leading character Noa (Edgar-Jones) has held for some time. A strong performance is often enough to buoy a simple premise, and that is the gamble Cave provides here. That need to escape and the human reaction of subterfuge is a fascinating one, adapted well for Fresh which relies just as much on the horror charms underlining it as it does on the awkward but lovable opening chemistry between Edgar-Jones and Stan. Friends of Noa are fascinated more by the meeting of someone without the crutch of a dating app than they are about the prospect of the real world.
Cave paints both as dangerous, and to her credit, Fresh is a dangerous contender and manages some of the more opportune moments. It avoids the comparisons to Silence of the Lambs and The Voices by providing an everyday build-up to that serial killer craze people are still on. That won’t go away, but Stan revels in the opportunity to play someone in the trade of cannibalism, but not quite the enjoyment or thrill of it. He is the post-pandemic business owner, running his profits from home and keeping his stock in the basement. Much of Fresh implores the audience to suspend a sense of their disbelief, and it is easy to do so with Cave’s stylish direction and genuine desire to innovate. Some of it works, like the trolley camera that takes audiences into the freezer and around the halls of a hidden prison, others do not work as well. The ratio is heavily in Cave’s favour, though.
The minefield of online dating may not be so bad if the alternative is bumping into killers and cannibals and everything in-between. Criminals are probably worse than awkward first dates, failed relationships or not leaving a tip. A lot of Fresh does feel like its namesake, an exploration and opportune horror flick that relies on the implications of body horror just as much as it does on the act of gore itself. There is surely more to come from Cave, who has found her footing with a grand bit of shock and awe filmmaking, relying on a steady hand behind the camera and a blunt view of dating. Dating is a cycle, although the cycle is rarely broken by cannibal captivity and body horror terrors.