“I didn’t think people still met in real life anymore,” Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones) tells her best friend, Mollie (Jonica T. Gibbs), after experiencing just that in a grocery store. Her “meet-cute”—even if in her sweatpants when it’s happening—is with an ostensibly awkward yet charming plastic surgeon named Steve (Sebastian Stan). And it happens to come in the wake of a brutally bad date Noa goes on via, what else, an app. And even though she already knows how bad it’s going to be based on him 1) being named Chad (Brett Dier) and 2) texting her right before that the restaurant is cash only (in other words, she better be prepared to pay for her own shit), she still decides to go in, telling Mollie on the phone that at least it will be a story to tell.
And how many women—especially writerly ones who fancy themselves “neo-Carrie Bradshaw” types—have agreed to participate in emotionally harrowing and/or potentially dangerous situations all for “the story”? It’s the unlucky ones, like Noa turns out to be, who can only wish, after it’s already too late, they had stayed at home where nothing ever happens but the transition to a new episode of whatever one is binge-watching. Noa, instead, decides to bite (pun intended) when Steve offers the tantalizing bait of actually being able to potentially tell one’s children in the future that, yes, Mommy and Daddy met in the flesh (another pun). Her vulnerability to his “innovative” method is understandable after she endures the many-splendored douchebaggery of Chad, who tells her at the end of the date, “Good luck finding a guy—bitch!” This last word being every man’s favorite coup de grâce to supposedly shut down any and all arguments about a woman’s “worth.” Because if she’s “mean” a.k.a. displays any signs of “impoliteness” (entailing a rejection of a man’s sexual advances), she’s automatically written off as persona non grata in a bloke’s eyes.
But Noa certainly would’ve been better off being persona non grata in Steve’s, falling way too deep too soon despite his total lack of an online presence. While Mollie rightly sees this as an immediate red flag, Noa instead seems charmed by it. Along with his offer to take her on a romantic weekend getaway to Oregon’s Cottage Grove (the movie itself set in “Portland”…but really British Columbia). And, as most of the few “wholly straight” women in Portland can attest, the scene is as consistently bleak as Chad, ergo the susceptibility of falling for someone as seemingly “decent” as Steve. And as the two strike an immediate candor that Noa mistakes for a “real connection,” he unearths such useful details about her as how she has no real family to speak of, save for her bestie, Mollie. This is an important characteristic—that is, being totally alone in life—to note when one is planning to abduct a person, as we find out thirty minutes into the film when, at last, the title card for Fresh materializes.
And though we feel for Noa in her now chained-up state, we can, of course, see it coming all along. No guy is ever this good to be true, least of all one who suggests an impromptu dance session in your apartment. The first time around, it’s to “You’re Not Good Enough” by Blood Orange, but things become decidedly less modern for the second dance they perform in Steve’s lair, in this instance while Richard Marx’s “Endless Summer Nights” plays and Noa is dressed in an accordingly ultra-80s bubblegum pink dress. One that Steve specifically picked out for her to wear like his little doll.
This particular garment comes across as retroactively foreshadowed by Chad rudely telling Noa, “The women in our parents’ generation, they were more into femininity… I think you would just look great in a dress.” This, obviously, is meant to make her feel like some kind of schlub despite the fact that he’s wearing a nasty long-sleeve shirt with a clashing scarf—as though that little “flourish” is meant to spell: “fashion panache!” And yes, many men do “secretly” feel the way Chad does, yearning for the days before Katharine Hepburn had the gall to wear pants and blow the lid off this entire “gender norms” charade. Indeed, this is part of Fresh’s undercutting message about dating in “modern” times in that things, despite technological appearances, haven’t really gotten all that modern at all, with men simply being (somewhat) better at hiding their true feelings about “a woman’s place.” “In the kitchen” comes to mind very literally when we find out what Steve’s true “operation” is all about: cutting up girls for their fresh meat to sell to other creepoids for their gustatorial pleasure.
As Steve explains it to Noa, “It’s about giving yourself over to somebody, becoming one forever. That’s love.” Hannibal Lecter might tend to agree. And yet, unlike The Silence of the Lambs, which also wields women as the sacrificial, that’s right, lambs to the slaughter of men’s whims, this has nothing to do with the type of grotesque male that once needed to be painted as a Buffalo Bill sort, but instead, just an “everyday” kind of guy one might happen to date without being the wiser. The point being, really: all men are sickos. Which is why Mollie reminds Noa at her low point after Chad, “You do not need a man.” Advice she (and most women) should have taken before allowing herself to be pressured by the deeply-ingrained pressures of “societal norms.” The ones that scream, “Don’t get caught out there alone!” despite the fact that we are all just that no matter what illusions (read: people) we surround ourselves with.
Then, of course, there is the woman who can’t help but let the brainwashing of centuries do its work via the old adage, “Stand by your man” (courtesy of Tammy Wynette). That’s the category of woman “Steve’s” wife, Ann (Charlotte Le Bon), falls under as we learn just how aware she is of his cannibalistic enterprise—going so far as to knock Mollie out when she shows up to the house in search of Noa (after finding a “Steve” lead through some more extensive internet digging). “It’s bitches like you that are the problem!” Mollie later screams as she knocks Ann out in poetic retaliation. And she’s not wrong. Were there not so many women who were, in fact, anti-women (largely because of the gender’s long-standing internalized misogyny), maybe men wouldn’t still be able to get away with such buffoonery (to use understatement).
Thus, all at once, the film tacks on a message about how platonic love between women is ultimately more worthwhile and validating than anything a woman could possibly get from a man. Especially with all the vibrator and strap-on varietals currently available. And that might just be the freshest take of all the movie has to offer: the notion that women really are better off not succumbing to fairy tale fantasies (hence, this flip-side cautionary tale) of a meet-cute (or “meat-cute”) that will lead to the “perfect” man. Because, as time will ultimately tell, the only thing “perfect” about men is their Grade A depravity.
