The horrors of modern dating seen through one young woman’s defiant battle to survive her new boyfriend’s unusual appetites.
While the title is Fresh there’s really nothing fresh about this flick. It’s a rather straight forward captivity horror movie in which several women are locked up and must make a desperate escape in order to avoid a terrible death at the hands of a diabolical killer. That’s probably the worst thing I can say about Fresh as it’s a pretty decent streaming horror thriller that pushes all the buttons and puts its characters in interesting enough situations.
The film plays like a toned down Human Centipede, where the physical gore is replaced with the idea of doing something unnatural and grotesque. With this – and the whole dating, men vs women, trust – I believe this is geared more toward a female demographic, although from the reactions and reviews it appears this didn’t land. For me the idea of a man getting a woman to trust him (dating wise), only to lure her into a death trap, and then having her need to do the reverse in order to escape is kind of an interesting plot, although not very deep. Let’s be honest though, this is a horror movie which are more often judged on the depth of the well a character is thrown down rather than the depth of the plot.
Daisy Edgar-Jones and Sebastian Stan have decent chemistry on screen and their acting is spot on especially during the tenser cat and mouse scenes. Mimi Cave delivers a slickly directed thriller that still delivers a gross out appeal without much gore.
For a streaming watch Fresh is perfectly serviceable and held my attention through twists, turns, pretty good acting and scenes that made me wonder where all this was going. As the characters do their dance trying to trick each other into trusting I was often kept on my toes wondering if they might actually be trust worthy.
*** SPOILER ALERT ***
If there’s one lesson to come away from Fresh with it would be this: if you even suspect your girlfriend might be into eating human flesh, don’t willingly put your “member” in her mouth.
Directed by: Mimi Cave
Written by: Lauryn Kahn
Starring: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Sebastian Stan, Jojo T. Gibbs
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