Fresh ending explained: Director Mimi Cave tucks into that big twist (2023)

Fresh has been tricking viewers since its release earlier this month thanks to its game-changing twist 30 minutes in.

You might be expecting a delightful rom-com with Daisy Edgar-Jones and Sebastian Stan after its opening act. But then writer Lauryn Kahn and director Mimi Cave drop a bombshell that turns the movie into something else entirely.

After watching the movie, you'll absolutely be chewing over what happened to Noa (Edgar-Jones) and what exactly Steve (Stan) was up to, so Digital Spy spoke to Cave about the big reveal and Fresh's bloody ending.

Spoilers are ahead, so look away now if you haven't seen the movie yet.

A tasty meal

Shortly after Noa arrives at Steve's luxury home, she's drugged by her new lover and wakes up chained to the ground in a room that is essentially a well-designed cell. Steve is no typical creep though – he harvests human meat.

He's not doing it totally for his own consumption, as he also sells it to wealthy clients who want to eat it too. Steve doesn't kill Noa or the other women he captures, at least not straight away, as he wants to keep the "meat fresh". As a plastic surgeon, Steve can take parts of Noa and keep her alive.

Noa befriends a fellow captive called Penny (Andrea Bang) who she can communicate with through the joint wall of their cells, and when Steve takes her for a shower, Noa tries to escape. She's unsuccessful though, and as a punishment he cuts off Noa's buttocks.

Unsurprisingly, this makes Noa change approach. Aware that Steve does still fancy her, she decides to seduce him instead and make him think she's into the cannibalism. On a 'date', Steve persuades Noa to eat some human meat (which he stocks in his home in a massive freezer, naturally).

Watch Fresh on Disney+

The worrying thing for a viewer is that much like Hannibal made things look tastier than they should, Fresh does exactly the same – and that was exactly the point.

"We designed all the dishes with a chef to look real enough, and familiar enough, to be recognisable, but have just a tinge of bizarreness to them, to feel like, 'Wait, does it look appetising?'. Just questionable," Cave explains.

"So we got pretty creative with different ingredients to add a glisten to certain things or add a certain colour to a dish. We went through a lot of food auditions and iterations of different dishes to make it happen."

Who does Steve sell human meat to?

The focus in Fresh remains on Noa's plight, but we do also see Steve carry out his, erm, job by preparing the various bits of human meat for his clients. However, these people remain mysterious to us.

We get flashes of who they are and see them tucking into their messed-up dishes (especially in one striking credits scene), yet their identities and motives are left unexplored. Cave noted that no version of the movie had more backstory for them, but the creative team "had our own understanding" of them.

"I think, in a lot of ways, so many things in this film are giant symbols or metaphors and also serve as a sense of reality, so it's a very strange world to be playing in," she continues.

"There is the feeling of there are people out there who are the 1%, or the 1% of the 1%, and can ask for – and get – crazy shit, and no one ever says anything or calls them out. People who do horrible things, and have a lot of wealth and ability to move in the world in a way that they don't get caught.

"I think that was something that we did want to touch on a little bit without getting too into it, and really staying in the story between Steve and Noa."

The bloody finale

By the time Noa is trying to escape by winning Steve over, her friend Mollie is unwittingly a fellow captive at Steve's place. After not hearing from her, Mollie investigates and goes to Steve's actual home where she realises he's a) married and b) actually called Brendan.

Unfortunately for Mollie, Steve's wife Ann (Charlotte Le Bon) knows exactly who her husband really is, potentially because it's implied that she was a former victim who maybe escaped her predicament in a similar way to Noa's current attempt.

Shortly after Mollie is captured and taken to the house, Noa puts into action her next escape attempt. During another date night, Noa sees the mementoes that Steve has kept from his former (and current) victims, including Mollie's mobile phone.

She pretends that she wants to sleep with Steve, but bites into his crown jewels instead. Noa rescues Mollie and Penny, yet Steve isn't finished yet and a bloody battle ensues that starts in the house and ends in the woods where Noa shoots Steve dead.

Their battle for survival isn't over, though, as Ann arrives and starts to strangle Noa when she sees Steve's body. Mollie saves Noa by attacking Ann with a shovel and bludgeoning her to death.

It's a finale where you're never quite sure if Fresh is going to go down the cathartic route of having the good guys win or end on a bleaker twist. According to Cave, it was always going to end with Noa escaping but the sequences were constantly shifting while making the movie.

"The ending was always really fast and chaotic because that's what that really would be like, and I wanted it to feel like it would be in real life in terms of the action scenes," Cave explains.

"When they start fighting in the kitchen, I took out all the music in the first half of that scene. I just wanted you to hear them, and feel them, and see that they're just real women who aren't action heroes, but who are just trying to save themselves and save each other.

"They always were going to come out on top, but the way in which they did it always shifted. We logistically would go back and forth on different things, in terms of different characters coming in and out, and who was going to save the day. We were constantly trying to get the right balance of that."

"He's married?!"

After their exhausting final battle, Noa is relaxing when Mollie drops the bombshell that, actually, Steve was married all along. "He's married?!," she responds in disbelief as Fresh ends on a hilarious beat with a perfect delivery from Edgar-Jones.

Cave notes that in order to make the final joke land as well as it does, they went back and added an earlier line in a scene between Noa and Mollie where they're discussing Steve before their fateful trip.

"Mollie says, 'He's probably married' and that line wasn't in the script. We added that in order to call it out later, so that you do get that laugh, and you get that reminder of that scene when they were all innocent in the park, and nothing had happened to them," she continues.

"Her delivery was great on that and that was a really hard scene to nail, just because you're trying to wrap up the film and there's a lot of shit going on. In a lot of ways, what's so great about the tone of the film is just that there is levity in these moments.

"When you are in these insane moments, sometimes you need to make a joke and sometimes you need to laugh just to deal with the trauma of what's happening."

Fresh is available to watch now on Disney+ in the UK and on Hulu in the US.