By guest contributor Gabby Foor
Online dating is a minefield, synonymous with unseen dangers. To avoid disaster, calculated chances are made to meet our mates: manicured profiles; quippy one liners designed to test the waters. Users are all on display to be judged, selected, and sampled.
This is how we find quiet cool girl Noa, adeptly played by Daisy Edgar Jones, in a sea of left swipes and hollow messages from online dating profiles. Despite this, she presses on in hopes of finding a connection. Fresh opens on the quintessential bad date: a little gross, a little sexist, with a little casual racism thrown at the server. This is what Noa deals with from a gentleman who apparently thinks he is knocking it out of the park. His idea of being complimentary takes root in “their parent’s generation” when he believes women tried harder; he also adds that Noa would just look better in a dress! By the time he’s swiped her leftovers and graciously let her take a little off her side of the bill, it’s clear this man has struck out.
Even though she gracefully rejects her greasy date when sparks fail to fly, he launches into the tirade everyone is afraid of but expects from the “nice guy.” Leaving her visibly shaken, she insults herself for even reacting with fear, thinking a man was (though to his credit, he wasn’t) following her. This contradictory feeling where you owe your best version of yourself to anyone you meet, while also never feeling entitled to boundaries, is exhausting to watch.
The grocery store scene is painfully unromantic but an “organic meeting” there is too perfect a pun to pass up. Sebastian Stan is charming and funny as Steve, the cotton candy grape toting suitor interested in getting Noa’s number. It’s also her first natural interaction in some time. His sleek attitude, carefree sense of humor and undeniable smarts (he’s a surgeon, no less), make him echelons above the men Noa has been wasting time on. While she is sold, her best friend Mollie (a gregarious Jojo T. Gibbs) who has been cynical about all men from the beginning it seems, still has her doubts when a weekend getaway is brought into play after a couple of successful dates.
Fresh is impossible not to spoil a bit in its second act after Steve stops off for the night in his remote home before he and Noa have reached their final destination, and, after drugging Noa’s drink, reveals his intentions. Steve’s charisma and role as caretaker never falters even as he victimizes, carrying well into what appears to be legitimately tender moments with Noa later in the film. Steve wants more than just a unique date with beautiful, thoughtfully chosen women; he wants an experience to match his tastes. However, Noa interests him more than your average girl. She’s the quiet, shy, curious, different girl he’s been hoping for. With a little bit of knowledge, Noa can take the cool girl inside and let her out, to mingle with Steve’s bizarre chemistry.
Fresh swivels between the disturbing and the absurd. Following sterile looking tracking shots as we navigate the hallways of Steve’s maze-like home, showing how he views women as a product, we get softer, dimly lit shots across a dinner table, with stolen smiles making you forget the horror that led you there. It’s performances like Steve dancing, hammering away in the kitchen to the beat of Animotion’s Obsession, trying on sunglasses, bras, and generally seeming thrilled with himself that take you away. It’s the film’s use of songs like this, along with very awkward, very human feeling dinner encounters where Daisy Edgar Jones shines, that keep Fresh, and its title villain, from getting too dark. Its grotesque subject matter contrasts with moments that reminded me of Ex Machina’s surprise dance scene, or bursts of nostalgic music to take away from the horror – reminiscent of The Purge: Election Year’s opening scene, meant to disarm you immediately with Parliament’s Give up the Funk. This shows that Fresh knows when to take its foot off the gas and when to stop telling a woman to smile.
While this film is half feminist beat down on a man that says women are the market for this violence and half a comedic exercise in how light-hearted you can make your meals, Fresh does leave some things to be desired. The fact that Noa lands Mollie into dangerous territory from her wanderlust is frustrating, but what bothered me most was the stone-faced character Ann (Charlotte Le Bon). I won’t completely spoil her, but she is morally ambiguous at best and an enabler or “part of the fucking problem” at her worst. I’m sure this flick would run well over two hours if we dove deeper into these issues, but Fresh is a sharply eccentric, sometimes comedic entry into a dark sub-genre. It has enough style and twists to keep the viewer going and enough laughs to keep things from getting too bleak, a nice balance for a film about women literally surviving the dating market.