Talking new horror classic ‘Fresh’ with Daisy Edgar-Jones, Sebastian Stan

“Fresh” has been called “Get Out” for women multiple times since its release, and I want to assure you that is definitely not the case. Perhaps there’s an element of bias there: My lived experience as a white woman makes “Get Out” feel inherently more subversive, more creative, more intelligent, more surprising (and I think it’s definitely objectively better).

But as a woman, I could predict every beat of “Fresh” — half because I saw the trailer, and half because every woman knows, through her own experience, through that of her friends, through stories passed down like warnings or folklore through towns and college campuses and the internet, exactly how terrifying men can be.

But “Fresh” is good, and it’s important to focus on what it is — a genuinely well-made horror that feeds into the very real fears and experiences that women have — rather than compare apples and oranges and harp on what it’s not. “Fresh” isn’t predictable because it’s bad: It’s predictable because it’s so good.

A flirt in a grocery store from a man who seems too good to be true is how “Fresh” starts, and in a sense, it also ends there — he is indeed too good to be true, and so anyone who knows this is a horror movie and not a breakup movie, or a "finding yourself" movie, knows that Noa — played by Daisy Edgar-Jones —  is in instant danger the second she agrees to go on a trip with him.

Or maybe it’s the second in their date scene, where says he doesn’t have any social media. Or maybe it’s the fact that he approached her, persistently, and we’re led to think it’s romantic because it’s Steve — played by Rutgers alumn Sebastian Stan of Marvel fame — and not someone less conventionally attractive.

When I asked Stan about what he hopes people get from the movie, one that so overtly dives into the violence women experience in the dating world, the first word that comes to his mind is “awareness.” Awareness, he specifies, about “the kind of narratives that we grow up with and how they may or may not influence our decisions when we meet people.”

He also discusses other media, more specifically, what we’ve “been told to look for” in other movies. “Fresh,” he says, is a “different telling of a meeting between two people that starts off one way and obviously becomes something else.”

“Fresh” is indeed that. It’s not every day that you go on a trip with someone to a secluded place and they end up drugging you, tying you to the wall and telling you they’re going to be chopping you up and selling your meat to their large cohort of freaky, cannibalistic buyers.

When “Fresh” becomes an overt horror movie — one that rather than remain a subtle one focused on how Steve targets and seduces Noa, becomes a game of her survival — it shows she’s smarter than other horror movie protagonists.

It’s so often we see someone use brute force to shove their way out of a situation, where a small woman physically over-powers her captor on a plan tied together with shoestring and gumption. 

But Noa’s different. The male ego is attacked instead of the male body (though there’s definitely some interesting physical attacks on Steve, to say the least), and it’s all the more effective.

Feigning a sort of Stockholm syndrome, Noa laughs at Steve’s jokes, eats her fellow captors and dances with him in a scene that’s been gif-ed and TikTok-ed to death for its aesthetic value.

That difference of Noa is a practiced routine for many women. It makes it easy to call what happens next, but it doesn’t stop you from being at the edge of your seat.

Two former captives of Steve represent that practiced routine in the film, the first of which is an unseen character who scribbles in the margins of a magazine to talk to future captives, revealing that privileges like an issue of Cosmopolitan or National Geographic means that Steve likes them.

The second, a character who's now his wife, shirks the kind of unity between the other women in the film — she now assists Steve in kidnapping, abusing and manipulating women.

But there's still unity throughout other female characters in the film, and the crux of the film relies entirely on female friendship and love. The first red flag to Noa’s disappearance comes in the break of routine between her and her best friend Mollie, who immediately decides to devote her time to figuring out if Noa is okay, in spite of the myriad of voices telling her it isn’t worth it. 

It’s worth mentioning that Mollie fits pretty snugly into the oft-used trope of the “Black best friend,” used to hollowly attempt to diversify a movie.

Though this is an (unfortunately) typical rom-com trope, “Fresh” never makes it clear if it’s subverting it as a tool to create a false sense of security that the movie is indeed a silly rom-com, or if it’s actually falling into the trope itself.

And either way, the shoddily constructed red herring it could be isn’t satirical enough to stand out as anything but an eyebrow-raiser.

But regardless: There's an important bond between Noa, Mollie and one of the other captured women, Penny. They have a remarkable ability to work together, support one another and embody a policy of "no woman left behind" to defeat Steve and get out of their precarious situation — even if it’s in more than one piece (cue laugh track).

Edgar-Jones agrees. “The true love story really is between Mollie and Noa,” she said.

“Through sharing their experiences with each other, (these women), like Penny with Noa and then with Mollie, it’s that that enables them to work together to overcome their situation," she said. "I love that ultimately they sort of save themselves. They’re not saved. It’s their strength that gets them through, and I just think it’s really important to celebrate friendships like that on screen.”

If there is one thing “Fresh” does other than make you laugh or bite your nails, it’s celebrating the bonds and strengths of women. Every woman knows “Fresh,” even if they haven’t encountered their local Hannibal Lecter (or Armie Hammer). But every woman knows the experience of pretending to find a joke funny or smiling when they don't want to smile or playing along with a man instead of confronting him.

In that sense, “Fresh” isn’t so fresh at all.