A friend of mine recently recommended I check out the movie Fresh, which I had the vaguest awareness of, but was one of those streaming only movies that had come and gone and quickly passed me by. Other than my friend saying I should see it, I went in completely blind to the movie, and had no idea of the plot, but got the sense that it was a thriller or maybe a light horror.
Oh my goodness, was I taken by surprise after the first half hour of the movie.
The plot, which I’ll discuss in this review, so, you know, spoiler warning, starts off like a typical rom-com, and focusses on Noa, played by Daisy Edgar-Jones who goes on a failed date, and then her friend Mollie (Jonica T. Gibbs) tells her ‘she don’t need no man’ before bumping into tall dark and handsome Steve in the supermarket. To be honest, this was typical romantic chick flick stuff, and if it wasn’t for my inkling of an undertone of edge, I’d have probably tuned out mentally.
The signs are there that things are going to take a more sinister turn when they highlight that Steve, played by the Avenger’s Winter Soldier Sebastian Stan doesn’t have social media and whisks Noa away for a mystery weekend to a place with limited phone signal.
As my suspicions lead me to suspect, Steve soon drugs Noa, and she wakes up chained to the ground in what I suspected was going to be a kidnap sex slave story. The kind that has been told a few times since real life stories came out about that real life freakazoid Joseph Fritzel keeping his own daughter locked away for years.
Actually, the scene where Noa wakes up was actually also pretty reminiscent of the movie 10 Cloverfield Lane, which is a great film, and like that film has an unexpected twist on what happens next. In Fresh, it turns out the title is in reference to ‘fresh meat’ and it turns out that Steve, who said he was a doctor, kidnaps women and butchers them for meat to sell to wealthy cannibals.
Yeah.
Bet you didn’t expect that going in cold, did you?
Literally, it isn’t until after this reveal over half an hour into the film that the opening credits and film’s title are displayed on the screen.
From here, Noa discovers that there are other women who are being held captive, and Noa’s friend Mollie starts to suspect that all is not what it seems with Steve. She manages to track down Steve to his home where he has a wife, but it turns out that his wife is in on it with him.
This aspect isn’t fully explored, and it is one of a couple of loose ends by the end of the movie. We see that his wife has a missing leg, and the implication is that her leg was probably taken for meat, quite possibly by Steve, who is liable to be swayed by the fluttering eyelids of a hot cannibal chick.
Noa does make one attempt to escape early in her capture, but as something of a punishment, Noa surgically cuts off her butt cheek…or cheeks…I’m not sure to be honest.
The plot turns slightly towards the darker and unfilmed ending of the Silence of the Lambs sequel Hannibal’s original ending. Noa decides to play along with Steve’s interests and ends up having dinner with him where they both consume human flesh together. She then seduces him before deciding to take a bite out of his meat and making a run for it. As a guy, I can say that I winced and felt for Steve having his hobnob bitten off, even if he deserved it for being a murderer cannibal.
Using this opportunity to attempt another escape, Noa manages to free the now captured Mollie and the other woman Penny (Andrea Bang) and the last act of the film is them working together despite all having been hacked up by the Sweeny Todd like butcher and they manage to kill him.
This was exciting, but to be honest, it was a bit lame that they had to incapacitate him three times before they finished him off. I’ll forgive that after she first bit his dick off, Noa may have felt better to run that try to finish him off (to kill him, I mean!), but after getting Penny and Mollie as backup, they had all the tools and time to kill him before running outside into the dark woods.
After he’s dead, his wife Ann (Charlotte Le Bon) shows up with a goon who she instructs to take his body to put on ice, and this is another loose end. Although Ann appears and tries to kill Noa, who is then saved by Mollie, the film ends with the goon still out there and the three women still seemingly in danger if they run into him.
Maybe they left it this way in case they wanted to pick things up immediately into a sequel. Another loose end was that Mollie had a love interest of sorts called Paul who knew of the disappearance who went out to the woods but upon hearing a gun shot flees the area. They do this with a joke, him referencing that he knows what would happen to him in these circumstances if it were a movie…which of course it is.
I think maybe people either expected that Paul would show up to try and help and get killed as he himself suggested, or that he would turn up at the end to save them. I think they probably put him in at this point as a red herring so they could highlight the three captured women saved themselves, as an empowerment kind of thing, and sure that’s fine, but they did leave a loose end that will stay loose unless they pick things up from this point in a sequel. I would have liked to have seen the goon return and then Paul either show up in his car and run down the goon, or they just jump in for the escape ride. The former would have still left things open for a sequel and the later would have tied up the loose ends.
After the credits start we get a mid credit shot of gross billionaires sat around a table with bloody human meat in the centre. This could still hint at a sequel, but I’d wonder if a good sequel could be made from Fresh.
Unlike many modern horror’s, it’s reFreshing (pun intended) that it didn’t start with a five minute gore shock tease just so you don’t have to wait for the horror to begin. And like I said, I went in almost completely blind to what the film I was watching was. I did note that on Disney Plus, the blurb about the film does even hint at the plot by saying that Noa meets Steve, a man with an unusual appetite. If I’d read that before watching the film, I would have figured out he was a cannibal. Lesson here is that movie producers should stop spoiling their own plot twists.
Conclusion
Fresh is a good movie, and at times is shocking, but also handles the horror in a more casual way than you often see, and this reflects how a character like Steve can do what he does as if it was completely normal. The film is probably most impactful if you go in knowing as little as possible, so if you’re looking for a film to recommend to others, tell people to watch it without reading about it first, or better yet, just put it on and say you don’t do spoilers.
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