Warning: SPOILERS for Fresh ahead!
Director Mimi Cave's Fresh is a serpentine horror film that follows the standard conventions of the genre in some ways while completely bucking them in others. Fresh stars Normal People's Daisy Edgar-Jones as Noa, a woman who has grown disillusioned with the modern, app-based dating scene, and Sebastian Stan as Steve, a charmingly awkward plastic surgeon who asks Noa out at a grocery store. Noa agrees to go away with Steve after two successful dates, despite the reservations of her best friend Mollie (Jojo T. Gibbs).
Mollie's wariness turns out to be more than warranted when Steve reveals that he intends to pick Noa apart piece by piece in order to sell her as meat to an underground market of uber-wealthy cannibals. While trapped in Steve's basement, Noa speaks to another one of his prisoners, Penny (Andrea Bang), through the walls of their cells. The two women try to keep each other sane and strong in the face of MCU actor Sebastian Stan's chilling gaslighting, dehumanization, and abuse. Meanwhile, Mollie goes searching for her best friend. Using sleuthing methods that are surprisingly grounded and realistic for a horror movie, Mollie tracks Steve down, only to be kidnapped by him as well when she figures out the truth.
The idea of women's bodies being desired, seized, and/or mutilated by murderous men in horror movies is nothing new. The genre is famous for "Final Girls," a term coined by film theorist Carol J. Clover in 1992 to describe the sole female left standing at the end of slasher movies such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the Halloween movie franchise. Usually, Final Girls are presented through the male gaze as virginal, morally virtuous, and somewhat androgynous, designed to be a masochistic vehicle for audiences' fear and terror while viewing a horror movie. While some critics have seen the Final Girl as a feminist figure due to her fortitude and ability to eventually overcome her oppressor, others deem her a misogynistic remnant from the early days of the horror genre seeking to punish liberated women while taking voyeuristic and sadistic pleasure in their pain. Fresh effectively counters this trope altogether by ensuring that Noa is not the only woman to make it through the film's ordeal, and flips the script by showing how working together is in fact the only way the film's cast survives.
Though the premise of Fresh makes it seem like Noa is on track to become a typical horror movie Final Girl, this is not the case. For one thing, she is never presented through the male gaze; if anyone is seen through a sexualized lens in Fresh, it is Sebastian Stan's Steve, not Noa. Though Noa is fairly androgynous, and has a name that could easily be male (a staple trait of many Final Girls, including Laurie Strode or Sidney Prescott), she is fully comfortable with her sexuality and knows how to utilize it. Early on, she sleeps with Steve on their first date and tells Mollie that it felt freeing. Later, as Steve's captive, Noa uses his attraction to her to manipulate him back into bed, where she bites his penis off.
Of course, the most important quality of a Final Girl is that she is the lone survivor at the end of her film. However, Fresh's epic finale is where Noa completely loses the title of Final Girl altogether and puts her other horror movie counterparts to shame. After Noa temporarily incapacitates Steve, she goes back to save Mollie and Penny as well. Noa and Mollie do not hesitate to help Penny despite the fact that she is missing one of her legs, making moving very difficult, and running an impossibility. The women must face off against an enraged Steve, and it takes all three of them to successfully get away.
Noa, Mollie, and Penny all make it to the end of the film, and receive no help from anyone but each other. Fresh's emphatic theme of women helping women is rendered even more explicit when Mollie saves Noa from Steve's wife, Ann (The Walk's Charlotte Le Bon), and bludgeons her to death, telling an apathetic Ann that "b**ches like you are the f**cking problem!" At its core, Fresh is in many ways a testament to the strength of female friendship, and the film makes it clear that there is room for more than one woman in any given space - even the end of a horror movie.
