Fresh had a couple of twists, including the reveal of Steve being married and having kids, and with that came another twist as his wife, Ann, has a dark and tragic backstory. The horror genre has been packed with adaptations, reboots, remakes, and “requels” in recent years, but there have also been original stories released either in theaters or streaming platforms. Among the most recent ones is Fresh, a horror comedy movie directed by Mimi Cave and written by Lauryn Kahn.
Fresh introduces viewers to Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones), a young woman disillusioned and tired of modern, online dating. One day, she’s approached by Steve (Sebastian Stan) at the supermarket, they exchange numbers, and they soon start dating. Steve convinces Noa to go on a weekend break away with him, but that day, Steve decides that they will leave the next morning and they will spend the night at his luxurious house. Unfortunately, it’s all a trap, and Steve drugs Noa and reveals he harvests female meat and sells it to unknown, wealthy clients, and Noa is his newest victim. Noa then has to decide if to follow along with Steve’s games or find a way to escape, even if that means losing some body parts, while her best friend, Mollie (Jonica T. Gibbs) starts looking for her.
Steve targeted women with no families nor anyone close that could look for them and track them down to him, but he definitely wasn’t counting on Mollie’s perseverance. With the help of Paul (Dayo Okeniyi), Mollie found out that Steve was a married man and the father of two kids, so she decided to visit them. Steve’s wife, Ann (Charlotte De Bon), denied that her husband was cheating on her and assured her she saw him that morning, and Steve showed up seconds after. Mollie called Noa’s phone and it turned out to be in Steve’s pocket, but Ann knocked her out, showing that she was on her husband’s side. The next time viewers saw Ann, she was about to take a shower. and it was revealed she didn’t have a leg, showing that she was, at that point, the only survivor of Steve’s cannibalistic practices.
Noa tried to escape by convincing Steve she needed to take a shower, and as punishment, he removed her buttocks. As she recovered in her cell, she was reading some magazines and saw a message from a past victim, which said that, if she was reading it, it meant she was his favorite and as such, she had to resist. Unfortunately, the one who wrote the message was no longer alive, but the Ann twist showed that not all of his victims had to die. Exactly how Ann met Steve and what made him spare her life, marry her, and form a family is unknown, but from Ann’s side, it might be a case of Stockholm Syndrome. Ann ended up being an ally of Steve and was well aware of how he caught his victims and where he kept them and did nothing to stop his horrible business. It was clear in the bathroom scene that there was tension in their relationship and Ann was growing jealous of Steve and his victims, so much so that she went to the house and found the chaos.
Ann’s backstory will remain a mystery as she, along with Steve, was killed by Noa and Mollie in the woods, and with that, hopefully, their “human meat market” business came to an end. Ann being a victim of Steve adds another layer of tragedy to Fresh, and unless Kahn and/or Cave shed some light on what happened to her prior to the events of the movie, the details of Ann’s backstory are up to the imagination of the audience.
