Fresh (Mimi Cave, 2022) (Patreon)

[MILD SPOILERS]

Bless this movie's heart. Fresh is an attempt at psychological body-horror that is so besotted with its own dominant metaphor that it can't be bothered to do such basic things as rounding out its characters, attending to its subplots, or building a recognizable world that doesn't stop just millimeters beyond the edge of the frame. I've seen a couple of reviews that have compared this film to Takashi Miike's 1999 masterwork Audition, but the resemblance is superficial at best. If a viewer knew nothing about Miike's oeuvre, and they were just drawing inferences from the text alone, nothing would prepare them for Audition's hairpin turn into bloody mayhem. But the entire first third of Fresh is so tonally off, and so clumsily executed, that only the densest viewer doesn't immediately recognize that a shoe is going to drop any damn minute.

Noa (current It Girl Daisy Edgar-Jones from Normal People) is an awkward twenty-something who hasn't had much luck with dating. Her best friend Mollie (Jonica T. Gibbs) sympathizes, but she is a young Black lesbian (with bi tendencies) whose job in the film is to exempt queer hookups from the danger Cave locates squarely within heterosexuality. It's a meat market, you see, and white guys are a bunch of petulant, defensive babies. So we see Noa go on an excruciating Tinder date, after which the guy starts negging her like a 4chan incel. See, Fresh trades in signposts and stereotypes, even while it butts up against real-world considerations like toxic masculinity. This film doesn't really care about real-world considerations.

That's because it is all about engineering the faux meet-cute between Noa and nice-guy doctor "Steve" (Sebastian Stan). He is so refreshingly open and attentive that Noa lets her guard down and makes a lot of unwise decisions, on the assumption that her intelligence and lack of recklessness is to blame for her romantic failures. So she goes away with a guy whose last name she doesn't even know, lets him spirit her away to god-knows-where, and then of course he turns out to be Not What He Seemed.

To say that Fresh implicitly blames Noa for her deadly predicament would not be wrong, per se, but it would suggest that the film is actually engaged with matters like causality or free will. It is not. Noa, you see, is not a person. She has no job, only one friend, no family, and so she has no outlet for the satisfaction of her physical needs. The film wants to suggest that she is part of the Internet Age, benighted by technology and anomie, but this is entirely by design. Given that the film has grown her in a jar, Aldous Huxley style, she is ripe for the picking by Stan's bland-ass Patrick Bateman manqué. It's her fate to become a (literal) piece of meat because, like any commodity on the market, she has no history. She's all steak, no sizzle.