Sundance 2022 | Review: "FRESH" Sets Sundance Audiences Spinning
10/12 ForReel Score | 4/5 Stars
It is hard to write about a film like FRESH, one of the first course offerings at Sundance Film Festival 2022, and not cook up some sort of food pun. See! I’ve already done it.
American director Mimi Cave has spring-boarded from her career directing avant-pop music videos with bite to deliver her ambitious and delightfully indulgent feature debut, a captive-versus-captor-style thriller that is more operatic than it is claustrophobic. Daisy Edgar-Jones stars as Hinge-haggard twenty-something, Noa, a woman who has been on too many bogus dates to see much prospect in the opposite sex, that is until she meets the strapping but bashful Steve (Sebastian Stan). The two enjoy an idyllic first date, they gorge themselves on forbidden fruits—grapes, cherries, apricot-flavoured cocktails, and the sort—and, unsurprisingly, they later adjourn to Noa’s. To continue the relationship on this fast track, Steve promptly invites Noa on a cottage getaway, taking her out of cell range, out of contact with her good friend, Mollie (Jonica T. Gibbs), and...you can sense where I’m going with this.
To divulge further plot details would be to do a disservice to the contours—and there are many—of Cave’s accomplished work. Teaming up with screenwriter Lauryn Kahn, she has spun a contorted tale of modern dating, which throughout its two-hour runtime keeps its unique mélange of horror stewing and always developing new flavours. FRESH is at times a dark comedy, at times outright campy, sometimes nail-bitingly tense, and even disturbing and depraved. And while it certainly could have been trimmed up if it wanted to pack a stronger punch, it has proven to be my most elating experience of Sundance so far. In case you aren’t enjoying yourself during this film, Cave’s diverse playlist of needle drops will have you looking like that famous gif of a bespectacled JAY-Z, head-nodding with an unmistakably concerned look on your face.
Daisy Edgar-Jones performs competently as the everywoman caught in the web, but it is Sebastian Stan, the Winter Soldier himself, who really commands. As Steve, the alleged reconstructive surgeon, he brings a level of sick, devilish glee to his role that you can tell he can’t help but be having fun with. He uses his polished, slightly roguish, Eastern European-influenced good looks like Steve so clearly delights in doing, like a tool to disarm women and have them desperate to believe in his “nice guy” routine. Cave capitalizes on her two players with gusto, and inspires interesting re-evaluations of sexual politics, what it means to “possess” someone, and the extent to which the female body can be exploited.
At the same time, there is a great deal that is formulaic about FRESH. The film’s opening 30 minutes, before it really takes shape, contain the most obvious examples. This is intentional, as Cave clearly intends to turn expectations on their head, but one can’t help but look at a character like Mollie, Noa’s sexually liberated, “can’t-be-tamed” best friend, and think about the countless times we have seen this before. Fortunately, much of the twists that come later in the film, while not entirely unexpected, still manage to give FRESH adrenalin shots towards its suitably explosive finale.
Ultimately, FRESH is a revenge thriller that won’t shatter your preconceptions about the genre, but will still have you investing every ounce of yourself in hopes of sweet payoff and all its mad sounds and sights. Cave still has growth on her horizon when it comes to pacing and character development, but her choice of a genre film for her first outing was a smart one; her control over camera, lighting, colour, and choreography is undeniable. There is a market for what she has done here, and there will also be a market ravenous to see what she does next.
WATCH THE TRAILER FOR “FRESH”