Fresh (2022)........only confirms what we've known all along......that horror movies offer the perfect venue for social satire......
Last week, we thoroughly enjoyed "Ready Nor Not" the enthusiastic class warfare splatterfest that featured a lower class babe smearing the walls with a load of entitled rich douchebags.....
And now we wallow in the gore once again with "Fresh" which turns the lives of dating singles into a......uh.....dare we say it? Meat market?
Before the film takes its left turn into hell, it plays like the start of Nora Ephron rom-com....with too-adorable-for-words Noa ( Daisy Edgar-Jones of 'Normal People'), enduring a vile blind date with a shlub who too quickly reveals himself as a creepy misogynist.
But don't despair, Noa.....who's that awkwardly charming guy who attempts a 'meet cute' with her in an all night supermarket?
It's Steve (Sebastian Stan) a plastic surgeon who's funny, charming, courteous, sexy, attentive, sweetly affectionate......yada, yada, yada.......
He's too perfect........until he isn't.......
Okay, fair warning. It's impossible to discuss this movie any further without spilling what's really going on and what it's really about.......so for anyone who wants discover this move knowing very little about it, BAIL OUT NOW......JUMBO SPOILER ALERT COMING UP!!
Steve still does remain a chatty, charming devil......except his name isn't Steve. And he's not single. But he IS a plastic surgeon and more importantly, a gourmet connoisseur of female flesh.
Which would explain why he drugs girls holding them captive for extended periods of time......so he can slowly but surely relieve them of their various body parts and sell their appendages as fresh meat to cannibalistic one-percenters who can pay for the ultimate dining experience.
So apparently Steve's 'meet cute' was more of a 'meat cute'......heh, heh, heh
Poor Noa.....her dream soulmate is a guy who objectifies women much in the same way as Julia Child objectified a chicken breast.....and could end up costing Noa an arm and a leg.....(sorry, we're helpless to resist sick, severed limb jokes.)
By the time you're halfway through this movie, you realize there's only one direction for it to take...which it does with a vengeance........in the same way that every modern horror movie feels compelled to splash enough red stuff to to equal to the flooded elevator from "The Shining"......
Also, we wouldn't want forget to mention the film's most witty moment - when it takes a Jordan Peele-like dead-on shot at that creaky ancient trope about a black man's usual fate in horror movies.....(but why it waits to display its opening credits until 30 minutes into the film, we've no idea...)
Fun stuff, but you'll need the constitution of basement-dwelling gorehound to make your way through it. Sebastian Stan's a loathsome wonder as Steve and Daisy Edgar-Jones, looking eerily like a stand-in for Dakota Johnson, proves more than a match for him.
A grisly 3 stars (***)......be careful who you talk to in the supermarket.....you may never look at frozen food section the same way again......
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