Fresh: Men Only Want One Thing, And It’s (Really) Disgusting

Last month was full of varying flavors of cinematic disappointment at this here thing of mine, and it was starting to annoy me a little. I can handle the occasional stinker, sure, but after awhile it starts to wear on me. I like watching good films, not dunking on bad ones.

So I’m really grateful for Fresh, a very tense, sharply pointed story about women as commodity and objects for consumption. It isn’t subtle, and it’s pretty straightforward in its construction, but it’s very well-executed.

We meet Noa on what is clearly not a good date. There’s awkward silence, a lack of chemistry so absolute that it creates a vacuum, and it goes painfully downhill from there. Dating apps are full of inane come-ons and unsolicited dick pics. It’s tough out there for her, and she commiserates with her friend Mollie about it. Mollie thinks she needs to be more willing to take risks, to just say “fuck it” and follow her heart. And that’s how she finds herself in the grocery store one night, talking to Steve. He’s handsome, charming, funny…a plastic surgeon, so he does well for himself. There seems to be some chemistry there. And so they go out for a drink, and he’s still handsome and charming and funny, so Noa says “fuck it” and takes him home. And that turns into something more promising, so when Steve invites her away for a romantic getaway out in the country, Noa - despite Mollie’s concerns - goes for it. One snag, though - Steve’s got something he has to do, so instead of heading out directly, they’ll overnight at his place and leave first thing in the morning. Mollie’s really concerned at this point, but Noa’s sure it’ll be fine.

And Steve has a really nice house, as befits a plastic surgeon. It’s modern, sprawling, but still feels pretty cozy. There’s easy conversation, some dancing, some drinks…and the next thing Noa knows, she’s waking up in a windowless room, shackled to the floor next to a futon mattress.

As it turns out, Steve services a very particular clientele, made up of people with very specific appetites. He’s not going to kill her, because his clients prefer the taste of the meat when it’s fresh.

This is a great example of what I like to call a film that isn’t a horror movie until it is. Most of the first act could be any kind of romantic comedy - you’ve got the dating woes, the supermarket meet-cute, the flirty chemistry. If you just happened across it, you’d think it was a rom-com. It’s only as it starts to move into the second act that notes of unease really begin to creep in, and then it all snaps shut like a steel trap. And once it does, it is firmly and unapologetically about women as something to be purchased and consumed. As I said, this is not a subtle film, but it does manage to both make observations about the things women have to deal with every day, large and small, while at the same time being a tense, economical story about survival. The men in this film don’t fare very well, but it’s in ways that are entirely believable, and speak to the ways that male selfishness and entitlement constantly betray women.. The date Noa is on at the beginning of the film is excruciating in and of itself - we wouldn’t call it horror, but it is an especially mundane, banal form of horror, the indignities waiting for you out there as a woman.

And as the film progresses, the horrors become more explicit, but no less rooted in the ways male selfishness and entitlement cause suffering on whatever scale. Men who only want one thing, men who can’t handle rejection, and the women who sell out other women to maintain their own comfort and prosperity, it’s all very much up there on the screen. There’s maybe one moment during the climax when it’s more than a little on-the-nose, but it doesn’t really ruin the moment or anything, and the film manages to mine a narrow but deep vein of black humor throughout that runs the usual problems with dating in the modern world through a bloody funhouse mirror.

It's not an especially flashy film, visually, but it’s got a consistent identity and a nice sense of place. A lot of the film takes place in Steve’s house, which looks like something out of a relatively restrained Michael Mann film, all brick and earth tones and natural rock and moody lighting. He’s a well-to-do man whose relationship with an attractive woman rides this woozy line between captor/captive and suitor/courted, which gives it a seductive element that seems adjacent to what (little) I’ve seen of Fifty Shades Of Grey and in that sense could be seen as a sardonic comment on it. That’s the fantasy, this is the reality. The rich man will keep you in his red room because you are meat to him. And we get sporadic flashes of his customers, lovingly unwrapping the parcels they’ve paid tens of thousands of dollars for and consuming them in ways both crude and impeccably refined. The soundtrack is an impeccably curated mix of the sort of pop songs and ballads you’d expect in romantic movies combined with foreboding ambiance and sharp, discordant stings. Flashes of its romantic comedy beginnings shine through in what doesn’t quite ever broaden out into grim parody, but definitely creates a feeling of discordance that almost seems mocking. And late in the game, it presents a nice juxtaposition between the idea of the object (women as actual meat) and the subject (the personal effects left behind), how behind dehumanizing terms like “the product,” there are actual lives and identities and futures lost, which takes what is already a pretty harrowing experience and makes it sobering as well.

For me, this film brought to mind the use of the phrase “body count” to describe the number of sexual partners someone has had. That strikes me as gross, but it seems apt here. Steve’s got a high body count, and even if it isn’t sexual conquest, the women are still objects to be consumed and discarded, commodities to be purchased in order to satisfy desires, and the film makes that point with the confidence of a cleaver chopping through the meat on a block.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu