You don’t need a master’s degree in horror to know how regularly and thoughtlessly movies subject women’s bodies to the rule of men. It’s refreshing, then, to witness a new wave of bold female-directed horror movies that have effectively flipped the male gaze on its head while conveying the discomfort of violence against women, from Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge to Julia Ducournau’s Titane to Dasha Nekrasova’s The Scary of Sixty-First. Mimi Cave’s Fresh aims for a similar kind of genre corrective through a brazenly black comic allegory in which women are viewed as literally nothing more than meat to be consumed, except its tone-deaf cheekiness only results in a feeling of dreary regression.
Cave and screenwriter Lauryn Kahn waste no time in comically illustrating the misogynistic hellscape that is the contemporary cisgender dating scene. As Fresh begins, its meek and lonely protagonist Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is out on a date with a blustery, scarf-wearing bro named Chad (Brett Dier). Truly living up to his name, Chad derogatorily comments on Noa’s outfit while launching into a diatribe about how women don’t dress sexy enough anymore, before also finding time to throw some racist barbs at the server at the Chinese restaurant where they’re eating. Akin to a sketch comedy’s take on a bad date, the scene makes valid observations but glosses over the more quietly insidious tactics that men regularly use to domineer women in favor of milking surface-level humor from ordinary douchebaggery.
The night comes to an abrupt close when Noa diplomatically tells Chad that they’re not a good match and he responds by calling her a stuck-up bitch and walking away. Noa seems ready to resign herself to a life without love, but then along comes plastic surgeon Steve (Sebastian Stan), whom she encounters at the grocery store in a meet-cute that feels too good to be true. He’s charming and awkwardly funny (he approaches her by clumsily opining about how cotton candy grapes actually taste like cotton candy), with a boyish sheepishness that instantly disarms her state of despondence. They go on a couple of dates and as Noa begins to fall for him, Steve suggests a spur-of-the-moment getaway to the picturesque woodland region of Cottage Grove. “It’s a straight girl’s fantasy,” Noa’s friend Mollie (Jojo T. Gibbs) mockingly tells her before Noa throws caution to the wind and accepts the invitation.
Dr. Steve is, of course, hiding something—in this case that he’s a black-market human flesh trafficker who kidnaps women to sell their meat as a delicacy for exorbitant prices. This reveal comes around Fresh’s half-hour mark and shouldn’t be too much of a surprise considering Steve’s suspiciously anonymous nature (for one, the doctor isn’t on social media) and anxious line of questioning during date number two about whether Noa has told anyone about him. Consequently, Noa is drugged and chained up in Steve’s basement, alongside a couple of other women who she can only hear through the walls, primed to be gradually dismembered—all while being kept alive for as long as possible, as that’s how the meat stays, you know, fresh.
The film’s audacious conceit is to play Noa’s predicament as zany comedy. This is epitomized most garishly by Steve’s sudden transformation into a cartoonish psycho surgeon who dances around to ’80s music while maiming his victims, pausing to enthusiastically offer quips like, “Relax! I’m a doctor!” Stan, whose performance is all intolerable mugging, and the filmmakers are clearly having a ball with this streak of lunacy, but to what end, exactly?
Cave and Kahn satirically position Noa’s situation as a logical extension of the aggressions that women face on the regular while navigating the dating scene. When Noa first wakes up inside Steve’s basement prison, panicked and confused, the film’s response is to sardonically shrug its shoulders while essentially proclaiming, “Bad boyfriends, amirite?!” In theory, this is a gutsy proposition, but the filmmakers seem more preoccupied with slotting in the next snazzy cover of a retro pop song on the soundtrack than in daring to make the thematic connections that would pull this kind of tricky tonal balance off.
Despite what Cave and Kahn appear to be signalling, Steve isn’t just another typical bad boyfriend experience writ large—he’s a calculated serial abductor and murderer. This could have been a jumping-off point to truly probe the thorny parallels between bad men like Chad and bad men like Steve. But the filmmakers opt instead run through the familiar plot beats of countless captivity stories once Steve’s true nature is revealed. The grating pitch of wackiness, then, doesn’t so much radically upend tired genre tropes than it provides a facile distraction from a trudge through a story that plays out exactly as expected, with the ensuing sequences of grotty gore-laden violence staged with a fashionable indifference.
At one point, Fresh does try and approach a level of introspection on the nature of female victimhood when Noa bemoans her stupidity for getting into this situation. One of the other captives responds by assuring her that, “It’s not our fault, it’s always theirs,” a steely rallying cry against victim-blaming and a forewarning of an eventual uprising. But when Steve’s captives fight back, it feels less like a cathartic explosion of female rage than a joylessly de rigeur example of how these types of movies regularly culminate. This last-ditch show of weaponized femininity also doesn’t quite deflect from one nagging fact: that instead of triumphantly subverting the male gaze of exploitation cinema, Fresh has been carelessly appropriating all of that gaze’s worst predilections toward callous shock value.
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Wow, it doesn’t surprise me at all that a man wrote this review. Your overwhelming lack of experience from a woman’s perspective is dripping from every word with unearned condescension. In a world where women have very realistic fears of ending up in a serial killer’s basement, you are the problem.