Fresh (2022)

Fresh starts as a movie about dating apps and The Dating Scene Today. That’s a premise I can buy for a horror show, and the opening scene fully delivers on all expectations. But Fresh has some other fish to fry and soon moves on to its destiny as a movie about billionaire cannibals and their exquisite tastes. One such, for example, is that they all believe women taste better. In many ways Fresh is riffing on American Psycho, featuring a yuppie scum guy, Steve (Sebastian Stan), who is making his way in the gig economy picking up women, capturing them, holding them, and eventually cutting them up into chops and cutlets. It offers up some very fine food cinematography along the way—fans of Big Night might think about giving Fresh a try (think hard, I say). Steve promises his victims to keep them alive as long as he can. But there’s something different for him about Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones). Why, he seems to be falling in love with her. What makes Fresh work for me is that it’s much less focused on gore and shock—there’s some, but it’s more antiseptic, just enough to convince you it’s horror. By contrast, and somewhat confusingly, it is more focused on maintaining a light and engaging tone. It’s entertaining, in short. A lot of it is clonkingly obvious by the points it wants to make. Director Mimi Cave and writer Lauryn Kahn seem aware these points are not that fresh, casting a wry and ironic wash over the proceedings. Still, billionaires consuming people, where have we heard that before? Women as disposable consumer product. Et cetera. To be clear, Steve is no billionaire. He’s just the moral equivalent of the Uber Eats driver delivering goods to the doorstep. He’s obviously making big money on it as he lives in a spectacular mansion with large walk-in freezers all over the place. Once we are hep to all the nuance of the details and tone in Fresh, the picture does start to flag some. It’s especially hard for me to believe the love story, and the action-oriented escape attempts only take you so far. But the picture is warmly humorous with an admirable relentlessness. A strange way to put over a cannibal holocaust, but there you go.