‘Fresh’ Movie Review [Sundance 2022]: Sebastian Stan Plays a Devilishly Good Psychopath

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Fresh is an exquisite horror delicacy. Director Mimi Cave turns in an impressive directorial debut from a screenplay written by Lauryn Kahn. Daisy Edgar-Jones and Sebastian Stan fully commit to the horror, while delivering successful comedic timing. Fresh is a good balance of flavors that hits the palate just right.

‘Fresh’ combines rom-com with horror

L-R: Sebastian Stan as Steve and Daisy Edgar-Jones as Noa | Courtesy of Sundance Institute

Noa (Edgar-Jones) is feeling discouraged by the dating scene. She endlessly swipes right and left on apps, but only finds tedious dates as a result. A handsome man named Steve (Stan) introduces himself at the grocery store and asks for her number. She decides to take a chance on an encounter that felt so natural.

Steve meets up with Noa at a local bar, where he reveals that he works as a cosmetic surgeon. He invites her on a romantic weekend getaway. However, nothing goes quite as planned. Noa soon discovers that Steve has many secrets and is hiding one particularly disturbing appetite.

Mimi Cave’s directorial debut explores the horrors of the dating world

That’s a wrap on Day 1 of #Sundance 2022. And what a way to end the day by keeping it #FRESH with Sebastian Stan & Daisy Edgar-Jones! pic.twitter.com/IVqAJmL2Mh — SundanceFilmFestival (@sundancefest) January 21, 2022

Fresh initially introduces itself as a typical romantic comedy. Noa is an independent woman who doesn’t believe in true love. However, she begins to have doubts after she meets Steve. He seems to check all of the boxes that she would want in a romantic partner. However, Fresh doesn’t truly dig its teeth into her real dangers until after the opening credits roll.

There are plenty of horror films that warn the world of the dangers of online dating. Fresh displays how in-person meetings aren’t necessarily any safer. Women are often treated as objects in the dating world, as men eye them as if they were meat. Kahn’s screenplay runs with that notion and puts its protagonist through the worst of it.

Fresh is also about toxic masculinity and the fragile male ego in the dating world. Noa often tiptoes around awful situations until she decides to stop pretending to be anything other than her true, authentic self. However, that lands her right in the hands of Steve. Nevertheless, she proves that she doesn’t break so easily.

‘Fresh’ is a stomach-churning good time

Daisy Edgar-Jones as Noa | Courtesy of Sundance Institute

Fresh is enough to make audiences swear off meat for good. Horror fans will be delighted that Cave delivers the bloody goods. However, many of the film’s grossest moments are off-camera. Even so, she manipulates the audience to believe that they’re watching something much more gruesome than what’s actually on screen.

Kahn’s screenplay incorporates comedy throughout Fresh, although it doesn’t take away from the gravitas of the stakes at play. Edgar-Jones and Stan are both up to the challenge, landing every joke with ease. Fresh is occasionally rather funny, as its natural sense of humor quickly transforms into much more twisted jokes that land even better.

Fresh proves Cave to be a director to watch. She balances the film’s varying tones, never allowing the horror, comedy, or drama to consume each other. Fresh has a lot to say about modern dating culture, but, fortunately, its commentary on technology is more of a back-drop than it is the point. Nevertheless, Fresh is worth swiping right on.

Fresh will stream exclusively on Hulu starting on March 4.

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Sundance Docs Feature Underrepresented Voices and Fresh Perspectives

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The 35 feature documentaries heading to this year’s Sundance Film Festival address a wide array of issues, including the U.S. maternal-mortality crisis (Paula Eiselt and Tonya Lewis Lee’s “Aftershock”); the battle over control of women’s bodies (Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes’ “The Janes”); corporate greed (Rory Kennedy’s “Downfall: The Case Against Boeing”); and climate change (Rachel Lears’ “To the End”).

But this year’s nonfiction lineup also includes several portrait documentaries: Kanye West (“jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy”), Bill Cosby (“We Need to Talk About Cosby”), Sinéad O’Connor (“Nothing Compares”) and Princess Diana (“The Princess”) are among the many famous and infamous figures being explored.

Clarence “Coodie” Simmons and Chike Ozah’s “jeen-yuhs” is arguably the most anticipated doc heading to Park City. The three-parter boasts 21 years of never-before-seen footage from the rapper. Simmons says after meeting West 20-some years ago, he realized that “this dude was about to be one of the biggest entertainers ever. So, I said to myself, ‘I’m going to do a “Hoop Dreams” documentary on this man.’”

Amy Poehler and Eva Longoria Bastón are making their doc debuts with two portrait docs — “Lucy and Desi” and “La Guerra Civil,” respectively. While Poehler examines comic icon Lucille Ball, Longoria Bastón investigates the 1990s rivalry be- tween boxers Oscar De La Hoya and Julio César Chávez.

Unlike recent years, the 2022 Sundance doc slate is not chock-full of films that already have distribution from A-list, veteran filmmakers. Instead, this year’s lineup is full of docs looking for a distributor, directed by Sundance alumni, first-time filmmakers and known directors who have never been invited to the fest.

In reversing the trend of programming films that already have distribution and inviting fresh faces to the festival, some find Sundance is going back to its roots.

“Sundance has had a lot of changes in its organization in recent years,” says Kathryn Everett, head of film at XTR, a production company with six docs at the 2022 festival. “There’s a lot of new programmers who have been promoted who I think have these fresh perspectives and definitely, almost ironically, it feels like this new group of programmers decided to really focus on discovery.”

Creating a marketplace more inclusive of diverse and experienced voices who have not had access to certain resources became a major talking point in the documentary community last July. That’s when Emmy-winning doc filmmaker Geeta Gandbhir publicly asked why two white men — Matthew Heineman and Matthew Hamachek — had been selected to direct an HBO doc about Tiger Woods.

“As a programming team, we’ve made a conscious decision to try to be more aware of our blind spots and to really interrogate authorship questions in particular,” says Basil Tsiokos, Sundance senior programmer. “Meaning, who is making the film? Why are they making the film? What is their relationship to what is in the film? Is this film coming from within the community that’s being represented? And if it’s not, is there still a compelling reason why this is the right person to be telling this film?”

Reid Davenport’s first feature doc, “I Didn’t See You There,” is one example of a film heading to Sundance with a director with a deep connection to the work.

“Reid, who happens to be in a wheelchair, is the right person to tell the story because it’s a very personal film about the invisibility and visibility of disability,” Tsiokos says. “We noticed that and recognized that his is a voice that we want to support and there’s a story that he’s telling that is really interesting.”

Sundance 2022: films and shows to look out for at this year’s festival

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Even in a normal Sundance year, as Hollywood wraps up and heads to the mountains, it’s difficult to predict what will and won’t hit. What might look promising on paper too often tanks on screen while, time and time again, the smaller, less obvious titles resonate instead.

What was set to be a hybrid physical-digital edition (after last year’s digital only fest) has now become online only, an inevitable downgrade after the rise of Omicron. It’s another low-key line-up surrounded by question marks, but here are the films to look out for:

Sharp Stick

Kristine Froseth and Jon Bernthal in Sharp Stick Photograph: Courtesy of Sundance Institute

Ever since the end of her landmark HBO show Girls, there has been a slight awkwardness to Lena Dunham’s creative output – from the ill-advised remake of Camping (Jennifer Garner is no Vicki Pepperdine) to her involvement with the one season, one star nightmare of Generation. But there’s every reason to be excited about Sharp Stick, her first film as director in over a decade. Despite a patchy final season, Girls remains something of a masterwork and her new film – about an affair between a babysitter and her employer – promises something interestingly knotty and exploratory. Dunham was inspired by female-led 70s dramas such as An Unmarried Woman and A Woman Under the Influence and stars in the film herself, alongside Jon Bernthal, Zola breakout Taylour Paige and Kristine Froseth.

Master

Regina Hall in Master Photograph: Courtesy of Sundance Institute

This year’s festival has a number of genre titles that deal with racial dynamics (Nikyatu Jusu’s Nanny posits a Senegalese woman in a tense, potentially supernatural scenario with her white employers while Tarantino mentee Krystin Ver Linden’s Alice shifts from slavery drama to blaxploitation thriller) but none sound quite as tantalizing as Mariama Diallo’s debut thriller, Master. More specific plot details are being kept understandably under wraps but we know that it follows three women at an elite university, built on the site of Salem-era gallows, battling discrimination as well as something even more horrifying. Regina Hall, an actor finally and deservedly getting her due, stars.

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande

Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande Photograph: Nick Wall/Courtesy of Sundance Institute

While the film surrounding her didn’t quite live up to her performance, Emma Thompson’s Sundance crowd-pleaser Late Night was at least a welcome reminder of the actor’s substantial comic prowess. She returns this year with Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, starring as a retired teacher who feels like her sex life has never been quite as exciting as it should have been. To fix this, she hires a sex worker. Director Sophie Hyde was last at the festival with her wonderful, criminally underseen gem Animals, and will undoubtedly be a similarly sure hand here, working with a script from comedian Katy Brand.

We Need to Talk About Cosby

A Still from We Need to Talk About Cosby Photograph: Courtesy of Sundance Institute

The crushing weight of what “America’s dad” Bill Cosby has been accused of by multiple women is the focus of W Kamau Bell’s damning four-part documentary, We Need to Talk About Cosby. In the series, Bell talks to survivors but also speaks to others who comment on not only the cultural impact of having to redefine someone from hero to villain but also the system that allowed for such abuse to go unnoticed for so long. “I never thought I’d ever wrestle with who we all thought Cosby was and who we now understand him to be,” Bell said of the project. “I’m not sure he would want me to do this work, but Cliff Huxtable definitely would.”

892

John Boyega in 892 Photograph: Courtesy of Sundance Institute

While the Star Wars franchise undoubtedly squandered John Boyega by the end, the British actor’s movie star charisma was one of the trilogy’s most exciting reveals. After an award-winning turn in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe, he’s aiming for more trophies with fact-based drama 892. Based on a 2018 article, the contained drama will see Boyega star as a haunted veteran struggling to deal with normal life who decides to rob a bank. The script is from award-winning playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah while Boyega’s supporting cast features Nicole Beharie, the under-utilized star of Miss Juneteenth, Connie Britton and Michael K Williams in his final screen role.

Fresh

Sebastian Stan and Daisy Edgar-Jones in Fresh Photograph: Courtesy of Sundance Institute

After the success of Get Out, a buzzy Sundance premiere back in 2017, the term “social thriller” has surged in popularity among industry types, linked to everything from Tyrel to Us to Luce to Promising Young Woman, used to describe genre films that speak to deeper issues and the specific time of creation. In Mimi Cave’s directorial debut Fresh, it has been used to describe the story of a woman, played by Normal People’s Daisy Edgar-Jones, whose boredom of dating apps leads her to take a chance on a stranger, played by Sebastian Stan, who hides a dark secret. The film boasts Adam McKay, fresh off Netflix hit Don’t Look Up, as producer and has already been bought pre-fest by Searchlight.

Call Jane

Elizabeth Banks and Cory Michael Smith in Call Jane Photograph: Courtesy of Sundance Institute

While it’s sadly never not a topical time for a film about the restrictive nature of abortion access in the US, 2022 makes for a particularly troubling period and so this year, two particular films will carry an added prescience. Both look at The Jane Collective, an underground service in Chicago that pre-Roe vs Wade, helped women secure safe abortions. Documentary The Janes takes a broader look while Call Jane focuses on a housewife, played by Elizabeth Banks, who joins the group after her pregnancy leads to a condition that the medical system isn’t willing or able to help with. Carol screenwriter Phillis Nagy directs while Sigourney Weaver and Kate Mara co-star.

jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy

Kanye West in jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy Photograph: Netflix

One of the most anticipated documentaries of the festival zeroes in on one of the most difficult subjects imaginable: Kanye West aka Ye. The immensely talented yet forever troubled musician isn’t directly involved with the project but he’s given it his blessing – a sprawling three-film look at an unusual life, two decades in the making. Directors Coodie & Chike started recording West back in the late 90s and have kept their footage private ever since, but now, they’re hoping to show us another side of an artist we think we already know.

Emergency review – endearing yet stressful contemporary campus caper

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Emergency, a comedy thriller about three college friends – two Black, one Latino – navigating a downpour of bad optics and decisions, traffics in several established lanes: the raucous one-last-epic-party romp a la Booksmart, where everything that can escalate will in the course of a single night; the hijinks-filled buddy road trip comedy albeit this time around campus; and the socially aware thriller in the shadow of Get Out, where every move is weighted by the looming threat of anti-Black racism in America. In other words, a ride somehow both warm and stressful, and an inviting mashup of familiar beats made fresh by a trio of grounded, endearing performances.

The film, adapted from the 2018 Sundance short by screenwriter KD Dávila and director Carey Williams with distribution by Amazon, opens in party comedy mode: best friends Kunle (Donald Elise Watkins) and Sean (RJ Cyler) determined to become the first Black students at fictional Buchanan College to complete a “legendary tour” of exclusive frat parties. The two are a classic yin-yang: Kunle the strait-laced and straight-A striver studying biology (the “Barack Obama of fungus”, Sean ribs), Sean the laid-back stoner with zero future plan but a tight party schedule.

They’re also minority students in a mostly white space. Dávila has a sharp ear for the self-aggrandizing paternalism of liberal arts colleges – in the opening minutes, a white British professor of “blasphemy and taboos” repeats the N-word in class and dials in on Kunle and Sean for their response in a “safe space”; after class, a white classmate offers to take up their “cause” at student council. But where some campus films could turn didactic, Emergency smartly sticks to the bristled, deep friendship behind the partying: an aimless Sean wants to make his mark on Buchanan before he leaves, and Kunle, secretly considering a PhD at Princeton that would separate them, doesn’t want to disappoint Sean.

When the two return home to pre-game and find a white girl (Maddie Nichols) passed out facedown in their living room, Kunle, the voice of reason, suggests they call 911. Sean, stoned and buzzed, balks at calling authorities. Two Black guys and their stoner Mexican-American roommate Carlos (Sebastian Chacon) with an unconscious blonde girl in a house that reeks of weed? What are the odds they’ll be believed? The specter of police misreading a situation to potentially dangerous ends is a Chekhov’s gun – the more strenuously the trio tries to avoid it through increasingly paranoid but well-intentioned means, the more they court suspicion and reason to find themselves apprehended by officers likely to afford them the least possible generosity.

Compounding the risk is Maddy (Sabrina Carpenter), a ticking timebomb of concern, self-absorption and explosive indignation, looking for her lost sister Emma with friend Alice (Madison Thompson), who is white, and Alice’s white-passing party crush (Diego Abraham) succinctly described as “from my Arab-Israeli conflict seminar!” Dávila’s script and Williams’s tight direction deftly render the group as both a lifeline on a collision course with the boys, and a trap – their concern is legitimate, their biases dangerous.

By the film’s midpoint, the accumulation of miscommunications, wrong place wrong time coincidences, and simply idiotic decisions begins to wear; Emergency is a comedy of errors whose steep price never escapes awareness, including that Emma clearly needs help, and at a certain point I found myself silently pleading with Sean, Kunle and Carlos to just call for help already. But thanks to standout lead performances, you can never fully blame one character for holding out on sense for plot’s sake. Cyler, as Sean, embodies a different type of American Blackness than Kunle, the son of immigrant doctors dressed somewhere between country club and substitute teacher. Sean is full Gen Z, slang-inflected speech and vape in hand, and Cyler plays his pitched, paranoid awareness of the racial sinkholes in every situation as a bruise clearly formed by personal experience.

A lesser film would have careened into the sensational or bluntly traumatic as the plot steps on the gas and both the optics and Emma’s prognosis worsen, but Emergency sticks the landing. Like Get Out, it relies more on the specter of anti-Black policing than actual violence; simply visualizing a potential tragedy, understanding its possibility, is enough. There’s still catastrophe. In the film’s climax, Williams assumes Kunle’s perspective for a gut-punch, slow-motion shattering of innocence. Watkins is excellent at conveying the nuclear fallout of Kunle’s disillusionment; in a standout conclusion, Williams hovers the camera on his face, and the waves of emotional devastation – humiliation, shock, fear, disappointment at the futility of truth against decades of biases – are their own kind of searing death.

But darkness and light go hand in hand in Emergency, which also features one of the sweetest straight male friendship heart-to-hearts I’ve seen on screen in awhile. Emergency toggles between styles, from playful to suspenseful and back, but Kunle and Sean remain consistent anchors throughout, as two young men carrying the weight of prejudices but buoyed up by a different inescapable, mutable force: a best friendship in flux but in no need of a 911 call.

Princess Diana Doc ‘The Princess’: Film Review | Sundance 2022

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At times it seems there couldn’t possibly be anything fresh to say about Diana, Princess of Wales, but Ed Perkins has found a workaround: Let the story retell itself.

The Princess uses old news footage, presented without any explanation or talking heads, to create an as-it-happened account of Diana’s public life, from the days just before her 1981 engagement to Prince Charles to her death in that car crash in Paris 16 years later. The straightforward film is not another attempt to speculate about the private Diana, but to display the image as the world saw it evolve. A flawed little time capsule, the doc veers uneasily between kindly character portrait and shallow attempt at media studies.

The Princess The Bottom Line An ambitious but flawed experiment. Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Premieres) Director: Ed Perkins 1 hour 46 minutes

In a director’s statement, Perkins says that by using this “immersive, unmediated” approach to Diana’s life and death, he hopes to find “greater emotional clarity and honesty about those events and the strange power they had, and still have, on so many people.” That’s a lovely, ambitious idea, but in the end just as detached from reality as the rosy outlines her personal fairy tale once promised.

The problem is that there is no such thing as an unfiltered experience of the past, especially when a filmmaker compiles and selects so many bits and pieces. Of course there is a narrative, which here might have been called “The Princess and the Press,” with the media cast as the nasty obstacle — a giant rock rather than a tiny pea — that caused the heroine so much difficulty.

Perkins created a much stronger documentary in the fascinating, undervalued Tell Me Who I Am (2019), about twin brothers, one of whom had amnesia and was told about his life by the other. In The Princess, viewers are asked to bring their own knowledge of Diana to the now standard version of the story — a narrative that positions Diana as a young woman naive about her royal future in this orchestrated marriage, who grew into a devoted mother and miserably unhappy but glamorous wife, and who learned to shape her own immense fame and live her own life.

The clips recreating that story are at times enlightening, especially when we witness the breathless news coverage surrounding Diana and Charles’ engagement and wedding. From the perspective of today’s harsher media landscape, it is astonishing to see how heavily the press promoted the fairy tale myth, with reporters calling the royal engagement a bright spot for Britain in the midst of the 1980’s economic recession. “The monarchy may be an anachronism, but it’s an anachronism the British dearly love,” a reporter’s voice gushes over scenes of crowds cheering in the street and toasting the newly engaged couple. In a different clip, the voiceover says, “There is no reason to doubt this is an affair of the heart.”

It might have been helpful, even essential, to know where this footage was coming from, though. We might be hearing the BBC or ABC or some long-forgotten, silly talk show. Was the press duped? Were these just two especially puffy journalists? On the media front, Perkins’ immersive approach lets viewers down, because no one would have experienced those reports in such a veiled way at the time.

Without background, we’re often left with heavy irony, thanks to hindsight. As a carriage takes Charles and Diana away from the church on their wedding day, a reporter’s voice says they are among friends because the military riders on horseback beside them are “under the command of Lt.-Col. Andrew Parker-Bowles,” and that Charles and Diana had recently stayed “with him and his wife, Camilla” in the country. There might as well be a head-smack emoji onscreen whenever Camilla — now married to Charles, of course — appears, as she does at one of his polo matches during his marriage to Diana.

The videos themselves are of widely varying quality, from grainy and fuzzy in the 1980s to colorful and sharp, a smart choice that contributes to the you-are-there quality. The snippets are smoothly edited by Jinx Godfrey and Daniel Lepira, and Perkins largely avoids the most obvious images, or uses them fleetingly, such as Diana dancing at the White House with John Travolta. But even the lesser-known excerpts feel familiar. After all, the press couldn’t get enough of Diana, and the choice of clips leans hard on the well-founded idea that the paparazzi hounded her from start to finish.

As the royal marriage unravels, it also explodes in public, with tabloid reports of extramarital affairs on both sides, and each camp feeding stories to the press. One headline shown here amusingly blares, “The Royal Mudslingers,” referring to the Prince and Princess themselves. It is no disrespect to Diana — maybe just the opposite — to note how shrewdly she went about managing her image at that point, encouraging friends to spill secrets to Andrew Morton for his sympathetic, bombshell book, Diana: Her True Story, which revealed her utter misery as a royal. Her complicity gets short shrift here, and in a film about her public image it should matter quite a lot.

The documentary ends with Diana’s funeral, and the always wrenching images of young William and Harry walking behind her coffin. But those scenes and others of throngs of people laying flowers for her don’t transport us to another time. They land as reminders of how strongly our sense of Diana and the Windsors has been shaped by speculative fictions that have the solidly-researched aura of truth, from The Queen and The Crown to Pablo Larrain’s recent Spencer. Thoughtful though its premise is, The Princess doesn’t give us enough to reshape those powerful narratives, or to be more than a footnote in the Diana industry.