4.5/5 rating
Not for the faint of heart, or easily nauseated, this new movie Fresh is a modern take on cannibalism. Sebastian Stan, who you might know as bad boy Carter Baizen from Gossip Girl, and in the latest docu-series, Pam & Tommy, is on a roll recently. Racking up a resume full of charismatically corrupt characters, his latest role Fresh, again left audiences in awe with what he could get away with. Or rather how long he can avoid the consequences of his actions…
This film was given an R rating, but in my opinion, should have garnered a trigger warning and a NC-17 assessment. It wasn’t sexually explicit, as one would assume as the movie starts off with Noa, the female lead played by Daisy Edgar-Jones, navigating the dating scene as a woman in her 20s.
Instead, it’s less about her sex life, and more about how we should have seen her encounters with prospective bachelors going south. There was little to no foreshadowing about how her life was going to take a turn for the worst. I was completely shocked when Noa found herself chained up in the basement of Steve’s (Sebastian Stan) secluded home in the woods.
Even more shocking, yet comforting in a way to know, this was a debut screenplay written by a woman! A movie about a man with the appetite for the meat off a woman’s body would simply be too unpalatable for most I believe. After learning the gender of the writer and director, I sat back with little to no commentary and let the women traumatize me about the possibilities of the dating world that awaits me.
I never knew a wicked thriller, comedy, and whirlwind romance movie with racial innuendos sprinkled throughout, was even possible until now.
As the plot thickens and Steve exposes his true intentions of quite literally ripping Noa’s heart out and selling it on the black market, her best friend Mollie becomes suspicious of her whereabouts. This opens a whole new can of worms and branches off into a new side plot.
After doing her best friend duty of becoming an internet detective, she stalks Steve’s social media and figures out he actually has a wife and children.
One step for woman, a gigantic leap backwards for womankind, it turns out the wife was completely aware of Steve’s underground cannibalism ring. Knocking Mollie out cold, the partners in crime move her to the room next to Noa.
Right before her capture, Mollie had already roped in a bartender whom she had recently been involved romantically, and would do anything for her. Except to save her from the grasps of an evil man’s house in the woods.Talking out loud to himself he said, “You’ve seen this movie before, get the hell out of here” after tracking her location to Steve’s house. This is what we can only guess to be a reference to Get Out.
Now left on her own in her escape plan, Noa used her womanly seductive assets to gain the trust of her cannibalistic capture and made a mad dash after he forced her to eat her best friend’s left breast. This is where the action really picks up.
Noa managed to free Mollie, and Penny who was down the hall. Steve had recently removed one of her legs, which made escaping all the more difficult. After stabbing and knocking him out, they ran into the forest just as the equally wicked wife arrived. She discovered her deceased husband and sought out the women in the woods.
The scene before her arrival we also learned that the wife was an amputee as well, implying that she was once chained in her now husband’s basement.
So, now just when you think she would be relieved to be free of him, she tries to kill Noa.
Mollie, finally the hero she set out to be, fatally stabbed the wife while exclaiming, “You bitches are what’s wrong with the world!” The end, credits roll, jaws dropped, woman approved.
If you think you can handle dismemberment, woman on woman crime, and skeevy men, then I urge you to watch this movie immediately.