Fresh unevenly skewers the dating game with a big cannibalism metaphor

polygon.com:

Modern dating is banal and dehumanizing. The most common way to do it is via app, where — in much the same way you’d order chicken tenders for delivery — you pick from a bunch of options provided by an algorithm. You know that algorithm is likely to let you down, so you just hope it won’t lead you to certain death. It’s a boring, horrible way to think about people, at odds with the fundamental desire at the heart of dating: to be seen as a complete person by someone interested in you, and you in them. What’s more likely is objectification: Dating apps encourage users to reduce each other down to parts. To meat.

The indie horror movie Fresh takes that familiar metaphor to a particularly literal extreme. The debut film from director Mimi Cave and writer Lauryn Kahn follows Noa (Normal People’s Daisy Edgar-Jones), a young woman in the throes of dating ennui, dating boring, ridiculous men who feel at liberty to comment on her appearance, want to ramble exclusively about their own interests, and then insult her when she isn’t interested in a second date, much less first-date sex.

Steve (the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Winter Soldier, Sebastian Stan) is different. Noa meets him in a grocery store — the first of the film’s many delicious ironies. He’s charming, clever, and not interested in pressuring her for sex. Even though she barely knows him, Noa decides to go on a weekend getaway with Steve after only a few blissful dates. This turns out to be a mistake when Steve drugs her and imprisons her, with the plan to keep her alive and slowly sell her body as meat to extremely wealthy clients who have developed a taste for cannibalism.

In spite of that horrific premise, there’s a comedic mean streak to Fresh that keeps it from