Saturday, June 25, 2022

Fresh (2022)

IMDb plot summary: The horrors of modern dating seen through one young woman's defiant battle to survive her new boyfriend's unusual appetites.
Directed by Mimi Cave. Starring Daisy Edgar-Jones, Sebastian Stan, and Jojo T. Gibbs.

Fresh is a 2022 thriller/horror/apparently comedy about a woman whose date with a man goes south FAST when she learns he wants to sell her meat to foodie cannibals on the black market. I say "apparently" comedy because while the premise of this story is indeed pretty wild and there are a few moments where it goes over-the-top ridiculous with it, the comedy never lands as much as the horror does, and I genuinely didn't know it was billed as a comedy at all until afterward. This is a pretty fun, gross movie that taps way into the female fear of being kidnapped by their dates. Our protagonist is a smart woman, as is her best friend who comes to her rescue, and the two of them keep the movie from feeling purely like exploitative torture porn, because they are both given enough agency that we can plausibly imagine they'll make it out. The film does a good job of really showing the unpleasantly visceral nature of the work our villain is doing and making it truly disgusting without actually showing *all* that much gore, which is interesting. Not an amazing movie or a groundbreaking one, but it hit every marker it needed to and was a good watch.

How it entered my Flickchart:
Fresh > Deconstructing Harry
Fresh > Anna Karenina
Fresh < The Maltese Falcon (1941)
Fresh < Grave of the Fireflies
Fresh < We're Not Married!
Fresh < Mixed Nuts
Fresh < Primer
Fresh < Fruitvale Station
Fresh > My Life as a Dog
Fresh < Autumn Sonata
Fresh > Kill Bill Vol. 2
Final spot: #890 out of 3599, or 75%.

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