“F**k Ariel!
– Stupid b**ch left the whole sea for a man.”

Juxtaposing its title quite harshly, the directorial debut of Mimi Cave and writing debut of Lauryn Kahn is… well, it isn’t very fresh. Derivative, basic, transparent, and juvenile, Fresh takes smatterings of ideas from great films that came before and carves them up until they’re all but unrecognizable then tries to glue them back together into a single piece of “art”.

During any given scene in Fresh if you were to pause the movie and write down the most obvious thing that could happen, you wouldn’t be far off. It’s almost as though the writing process involved asking a group of people the most common cliché they could think of when discussing online dating, and then they wrote all of those into a single movie. Now, don’t get me wrong, that kind of self-aware cheese can be very good [Shaun of the Dead/What we do in the Shadows] but, this movie doesn’t utilize any of the tongue-in-cheek humor or brevity that titles who succeed at it do.

There are two strong scenes in this film, and they are very strong. One is strong creatively, the other emotionally. The problem is that they follow one another, feel like they’re from entirely different movies -- not only from each other but from the one they’re in-- and don’t actually have any impact on the story itself because directly after them it all falls apart and gets stupid again. The saving grace of this movie is some of the cinematography by Pawel Pogorzelski of Hereditary and Midsommar. Other than that, Fresh is cheap, stupid, and vain; insisting its deeper, more clever, and more important than it really is.

As a satire on the romcom/ horror genre, Fresh still falls short. It offers little commentary on the absurd themes of either genre, delivering some laughs along the way but never quite feeling genuinely aware of its identity. Nothing is quite silly enough to portend true comedy and nothing is quite clever enough to add any meaningful narrative. Both 2014 films What We Do in the Shadows and House Bound are great examples of satires that lean into their tropes and commit to the gag in a way that makes it clear and fun while they still uphold their meaning and sincerity. Fresh is simply too uneven, unintelligent, and convenient to function as a worthwhile satire.

This is a movie being lauded because of its subject matter while its critical filmmaking pieces are going largely ignored. The subject matter is important so, before you write off my opinion because I “just don’t get it”, in no particular order, try some of these films in place of the jejune Fresh:

Promising Young Woman <8.3> [2020]
Raw <7.9> [2016]
Violation <9.3> [2020]
Swallow <8.3> [2019]
And, for the particularly bold, Martyrs <8> [2008]

As a disclaimer, Martyrs is not for the faint of heart and Raw is particularly gross but exceptionally well made as well. Fresh has taken themes or ideas from each of these and bastardized them such that they’re only vaguely recognizable, but hasn’t improved on any of them whatsoever.

While I will be interested in keeping an eye on director Mimi Cave because there is some interesting creative direction here and her desire to tell meaningful stories is intriguing, the writing in Fresh is just too dumb, too transparent, and too convenient for this particular film to matter in the slightest.

“It’s not our fault, Noa, it’s always… theirs.”