Editor’s Note: Vanyaland Film Editor Nick Johnston is here in Boston, but his heart is in Utah as he remotely covers the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. This year’s Sundance is a virtual edition, but that’s not stopping the film premieres from flowing. Check out our official Sundance preview, scan through all our Sundance 2022 reviews as they are published, and check out our full archives of past festivals.
If you only paid attention to his work as the most thinly-sketched and frankly boring character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I could understand if you found Sebastian Stan to be somewhat like Bucky Barnes: Occasional bursts of charisma that are often too far and few in between to speed past the genuine escape velocity of interest. It’s an opinion I’ve encountered a ton online in a number of film communities, but I’m gonna be real with you for a second: Compared to most Marvel actors — with the possible exception of Dave Bautista and maybe Anthony Mackie — Stan has by far the most interesting side-career in smaller-scale and mid-budget films. Since joining the MCU, he’s worked with the likes of Jonathan Demme, Steven Soderbergh, Ridley Scott, Craig Gillespie, and Karyn Kusama, and has turned in often-good-to-great work in each of those resultant films (especially in his work with those last two directors, where he was among the best parts of those films). He’s got good looks, affability, a good sense of humor (and comic timing), and most importantly, he has the willingness to subvert all of them. Hence, the appeal of his role in Mimi Cave’s FRESH, in which Stan weaponizes his leading man charm to amusing and, occasionally, gross effect.
Now, Stan’s not the lead of Cave’s film, but he is its primary antagonist, and we’re playing by Batman Villain rules here, which means that he’s its most interesting character. That honor goes to Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones), a thirty-something who spends her nights trawling through dating apps and going out with obnoxious and dumb shitheads in order to try and find the right person for her. They’re the typical assortment of knock-off Tinder assholes, who are rude to waitstaff and almost stupefyingly lacking in even the most common niceties, which is why it blows Noa’s mind when she finds herself enjoying witty banter with a dude she just happens to meet at the supermarket one night. He’s Steve (Stan), a plastic surgeon who, surprisingly enough, seems like a decent catch: He’s smart, witty, considerate, good in bed, and basically just fits the definition of “too good to be true.” So, sure enough, Noa surprises herself and agrees to go with him for a weekend upstate on the spur of the moment. But while they’re having cocktails in his oversized art-deco living room in the mountainous estate he owns, she starts to notice that she’s feeling a little woozy from the Manhattan he’s made her, and before she knows it, she wakes up handcuffed to a pipe in a de facto jail cell. You see, Steve’s got some secrets, and he’s got exquisite tastes, along with his pals and customers.
With a hook like that, what could go wrong? Not too much, honestly: Cave’s direction is solid and sturdy, with a number of interesting environments and fun editing, and the script, by former Adam McKay collaborator Lauryn Kahn (who somehow managed to pull McKay away from his planet-saving endeavors long enough to get him to agree to be an executive producer on this), is whip-smart and funny, if a little big shaggy. At 90 minutes, FRESH would work just as well but, at 117, it feels just a little bit too elongated for its own good, especially when Cave and Kahn go outside of the film’s central dynamic to focus on Noa’s friend Mollie (Jojo T. Gibbs) and her quest to find her friend when she starts acting a little strange on iMessage. It’s not a terribly deflating error, and Gibbs is often quite funny in her own right, but it feels like a distraction from the film’s greatest asset, which is the psychological tug-of-war between Stan and Edgar-Jones. He’s genuinely unhinged here, whether it’s beating a cut of… something with a meat clever to the sounds of Information Society’s “I Want to Know” or struggling with his own growing feelings for Noa while also trying to resign himself to her ultimate ending. It’s fearless and deeply goofy work, assisted by Edgar-Jones own ability to banter and hang with whatever he’s serving up to her. Perhaps this might be the moment that some start to pay attention to just how interesting and strange Stan’s career outside of Marvel is because lord knows I’d love to see him in more stuff like this.