Film Review: FRESH: Faux Finish to a Derivative Grand Guignol Hybrid [Sundance 2022]

Fresh Review

Fresh (2021) Film Review from the 45th Annual Sundance Film Festival, a movie directed by Mimi Cave, starring Daisy Edgar-Jones, Sebastian Stan, Jojo T. Gibbs, Charlotte Le Bon, Andrea Bang, and Dayo Okeniyi.

Fresh is an unsavory stew that disappoints on as many levels as the tropes it derives from.

The often predictable plot is held together by the common thread of support among young women abducted and held captive by a flesh peddler, in the very literal sense of the word.

The film has a promising beginning. Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones) sets up an on-line first date with Chad (Brett Dier) at a Chinese restaurant. From past experience, presumably, Noa doesn’t expect much, and this time gets way less than she bargained for. Chad is so gauche and obtuse it could be taken as some form of perverse honesty. One can’t help but laugh with poor Noa, or sympathize when he calls her ‘a stuck-up bitch.’

But the humor or sympathy doesn’t last long. Chad the Cad is just the tip of the misandrist iceberg, toward which Noa heads full-steam like the Titanic. Enter Steve (Sebastian Stan), fraternity handsome and twice as charming. And a doctor to boot, thus having the skills to broker steaks to rich connoisseurs who hanker for human flesh. Best friend Millie (in a snappy performance by Jojo T. Gibbs) disappears and her worried bartender friend (Dayo Okeniyi) eventually follows her ‘bread crumbs’ right to Steve’s front door, only to speed off when he hears a gunshot, never to be seen again. Apparently there isn’t one guy in the movie who’s worth good red herring.

The acting is constrained by the limits of the characters and consequently uneven. The cinematography is quite skilled and brisk. The tenderness between Noa and Steve have some evident credibility, and they interact on screen with a certain rapport. Noa’s escape plan is spot on, and she deploys it for the audience like a champ. It’s not hard to see how Steve, sociopath that he is, would fall for it–surface charm is something he could relate to. He gets genuinely misty when waxing philosophical, as he takes a page from Dahmer’s playbook: consuming the person’s flesh makes him “one” with ‘her.’ Writer Lauryn Kahn’s established strength in writing romance and comedies is evident here.

Missing rationale where criminal intent and action is concerned, however, undermines much of the story, and converges at the climax and resolution. Steve as a surgical resident instead of a practicing doctor, for example, is something of a mystery. Ask any doctor: nothing eats up time like service rotations at a hospital, and much of it is on-call. (They’re not called residents for nothing.) And then there’s the full operating room with no staff–very tricky.

Later, Noa rescues her three fellow prisoners, and they manage to team up and knock Steve unconscious. Why they didn’t incapacitate him right then is anyone’s guess, having the means handy (and plenty of opportunity to continue the singular and ironic act of revenge Noa exacted in the bedroom). But no, they opted instead to limp off into the woods with Steve soon after them, gun in hand.

The ending is especially obscure. Noa and Millie sit against a tree, chuckling over some inside joke. (The third escapee is nowhere in sight.) There follows a kaleidoscopic meat-flower segue into a quartet of executives sitting at an immaculate white-clothed table, raw chops piled on plates before them, suddenly taped inside an elegant box Steve used to ship their delicacies. Imaginative imagery, falling short of surreal because the images lack clear foundation; the rapid flashbacks are too brief to amount to any significant exposition.

For those interested in the cannibal canon, there are far more suspenseful and engaging stories out there, both fact and fiction. Alive, both the film and the memoir, aren’t bad. There are a number of documentaries on Jeffrey Dahmer, and My Friend Dahmer is an interesting feature film based on the graphic novel. One should definitely check out Bob Balaban’s extraordinary black comedy, Parents, the cult films Motel Hell and Eating Raoul, among literally scores of others.

In the long run, Fresh tries hard for a thriller with subtexts of romance and female empowerment, but misses the mark. Worth it for some imagery, good editing and a decent soundtrack.

Rating: 4/10

Leave your thoughts on this Fresh review and the film below in the comments section. Readers seeking to support this type of content can visit our Patreon Page and become one of FilmBook’s patrons. Readers seeking more Sundance Film Festival news can visit our Sundance Film Festival Page, our Film Festival Page, and our Film Festival Facebook Page. Readers seeking more film reviews can visit our Movie Review Page, our Movie Review Twitter Page, and our Movie Review Facebook Page. Want up-to-the-minute notifications? FilmBook staff members publish articles by Email, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, Reddit, and Flipboard.