Fresh (2022)

Fresh is the rare horror-thriller that feels genuinely contemporary: it takes the anxieties of modern dating and turns them into a slick, sharp-toothed satire with real bite. Mimi Cave directs with swagger and precision, balancing queasy suspense and dark comedy so confidently that you’ll find yourself laughing one moment and squirming the next, often in the same scene. Daisy Edgar-Jones grounds the film with a smart, watchful performance that makes the danger feel personal, while Sebastian Stan weaponizes charm in a way that’s as entertaining as it is unnerving, and the friendship at the story’s center gives the mayhem an unexpectedly satisfying backbone. Fair warning: it’s not for the squeamish—this one goes hard on gore and discomfort—but if you like your genre movies stylish, audacious, and a little wickedly funny, Fresh is a feast.

Fresh is clearly trying to mash up a modern dating nightmare with glossy, satirical horror, and for a while it works thanks to confident style and two committed leads (Daisy Edgar-Jones sells the dread, Sebastian Stan sells the charm). The problem is the tone: it keeps winking at you with cheeky humor just as it wants you to feel genuinely sick, and that push-pull can make the social commentary feel either heavy-handed or oddly undercooked. It’s also not “edgy” violence so much as explicit, body-focused brutality, so if graphic flesh-and-blood horror or sexualized menace isn’t your idea of a good time, this will be a hard pass. If you like slick, twisty thrillers with a mean streak and can tolerate uneven satire, you’ll probably have fun; if you want consistent dread or sharper thematic bite, you may leave feeling it never quite earns its finale.