Sebastian Stan and Daisy Edgar-Jones are bringing a romantic thriller to life in the form of Mimi Cave’s Fresh—romantic if you’re into the “freshness” of … well, flesh. The trailer takes us on a journey with Noa (Edgar-Jones) and her search for romance, and just when she is about to give up, she meets Steve (Stan) in a grocery store when he makes a bad joke to her.
Their relationship starts off just as you’d think, and he clearly “seems nice,” but then (as the trailer review says) things take a turn about thirty minutes into the movie that is on full display about halfway into the trailer.
Coming to Hulu on March 4, Fresh doesn’t seem like your typical romantic story, and … good, I wouldn’t want this to be typical. But it feels like a fresh take (pun intended) on the genre and is giving us that cult classic feel that we love to find in these sort of thriller flicks.
Someone looked at an AO3 tag
“It’s a straight girl’s fantasy come true, right?” the trailer says, and it is as if Mimi Cave and writer Lauryn Kahn have decided to shame a lot of AO3 users. In fact, you can find quite a bit of fanfic out in the world about cannibals outside the world of Hannibal Lecter.
I’m not part of this trend, mainly because I have a deep-seated fear of it thanks to my mother explaining the plot of Hannibal (2001) to me because I annoyingly kept asking her about it. But it is something that has been romanticized throughout the years thanks to characters like Hannibal Lecter. There’s nothing really sexy about them to me, but I did subscribe to the Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter of it all from the TV show Hannibal, and so I suppose I am part of the problem.
“It’s about giving… giving yourself over to somebody… becoming one forever,” Steve tells Noa in the trailer. “That’s love.” Honestly, if you’re like myself and watch things like Catching Killers on Netflix, this screamed the “Toronto Village Killer” episode when they learned about a website where you could talk about eating people. Pair that with the charm and charisma of Sebastian Stan, and I could easily understand why a character like Noa gets roped in.
Bring out your cult classics
Overall, the trailer sets a tone for this movie that I can’t quite figure out. It seems lighter at times, and as writer Josie Meléndez points out, it has the cult classic feel of movies like Jennifer’s Body, so it could be a new entry into that category for us.
If Fresh is anything like Jennifer’s Body in terms of how we all react to it, we’re in for quite a ride, and I can’t wait to see what the movie brings to the table for both Edgar-Jones and Stan. That plus the rave reviews that Fresh got out of Sundance this year should have everyone excited to see Mimi Cave’s film.
(featured image: Searchlight Pictures)
