From super-hero to super-terrible boyfriend, Sebastian Stan and company are held back by the messy cinematography of Hulu’s latest horror original.
If you’re tabbing out to check this review, wondering if this movie gets better, the answer is…
Sort of.
And I get why you’d do that. The first 30 minutes of Fresh are shot like a very unappealing rom-com, something akin to a lost episode of Netflix’s Dating Around; no shade to D.A., I love it, but it somehow manages to make mood lighting look overly sanitized, and this film’s opening reel has that problem as well. And even if it’s intentionally bad, it’s not a creative enough decision to make up for its ugliness, or the somewhat bad editing in the beginning. I only put so much emphasis on this because it does get better. It takes about a third of the runtime, but Fresh begins to aesthetically redeem itself past the thirty-minute mark.
Directorially, the improvement is wonderful from there onward. The set design of Steve’s home/torture dungeon brings hostile coziness with its very aggressive color palette. The layout of the building is almost claustrophobic, and it allows director Mimi Cave and crew to excel with utilizing shadows to build up walls up between the captive Noa (Daisy Edgar Jones) and her kidnapper Steve (Sebastian Stan), who has been taken prisoner as human livestock for her new beau’s cannibal customers.
Edgar-Jones and Stan are easily the saving grace of this film, as they both excel in one thing in particular: their physical performances. I feel like I never watch a film that has excellent physical acting that isn’t heavily orchestrated in some way, but here both of our leads do a hell of a job. Whether it’s Noa lashing out, shrinking inward, hobbling around, or crawling post-surgery, Edgar-Jones sells the misery of the whole situation with her body language and expressiveness.
Stan brings a kind of bizarre physical comedy to the table with his exuberant energy early on. The dark humor elicited by a montage of this madman dancing/cooking with a severed human leg isn’t funny per se, but his derangement is quite entertaining for how believable it is. The psychopathic calmness of Steve makes him memorable, and the conflict between them feels textured for it. That’s what this movie has going for it; its immersive acting keeps you hooked. Even when it approaches you with concepts that feel completely off the rails, it’s able to execute them disturbingly because of this.
Jojo T. Gibbs’s, playing Noa’s best friend Mollie, works well with Edgar-Jones, giving off believable on-screen chemistry of a lifelong friendship. But the dialogue they’re given doesn’t service that neat connection between them. In fact, the script of this film is possibly the second weakest part of it all. The themes of misogyny being profitably pervasive and women also falling victim to its lures and camouflage is fascinating, and doubly so when paired with grody meat visuals reminiscent of something like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. But the approach it takes gives us dialogue that feels too ham-fisted and on the nose, trying to drive home the thematic elements in a way that the obvious horrors we’re being shown already do. The substance is overshadowed by moments like Mollie outright stating part of the film’s thesis while she’s caving in the head of Steve’s wife; it takes a moment that would be triumphant if it was subdued and makes it laughably bad when you get words no one would ever say mid-murder paired with poor special effects.
But what is the worst thing about this film? The music. By God, are the needle drops in this movie obnoxious. The need to pump this full of recognizable music betrays the unsettling silence this movie could have generated with its concepts and acting, or even a more robust original soundtrack to supplement the visual.
If you can overlook bad technical work in favor of good performances from the cast, I would suggest giving this a try as it is visually appealing. Otherwise, folks, steer clear of this 100-minute mystery meat surprise if the downsides give you more red flags than a bad dating profile.
You can watch Fresh streaming on Hulu.