Fresh review: an uneven cannibal horror story skewers the dating game

Modern dating can be dehumanizing, and it is often banal. The most common way to do it is via app, where — in much the same way you’d order chicken tenders for delivery — you pick from a bunch of options provided by an algorithm. You know that algorithm is likely to let you down, so you just hope it won’t lead you to certain death. It’s a boring, horrible way to think about people, at odds with the fundamental desire at the heart of dating: to be seen as a complete person by someone interested in you, and you in them. What’s more likely is objectification: Dating apps encourage users to reduce each other down to parts. To eat meat.

Indie Horror Movie NewThis film takes the familiar metaphor to an extreme literal. Noa is the subject of Mimi Cave’s debut film and Lauryn Kahn’s first screenplay.Normal people’s Daisy Edgar-Jones), a young woman in the throes of dating ennui, dating boring, ridiculous men who feel at liberty to comment on her appearance, want to ramble exclusively about their own interests, and then insult her when she isn’t interested in a second date, much less first-date sex.

Steve (the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Winter Soldier, Sebastian Stan) is different. Noa meets him in a grocery store — the first of the film’s many delicious ironies. He’s charming, clever, and not interested in pressuring her for sex. Noa is a stranger to Steve and decides that she wants to spend a weekend with him. Steve drug her and puts her into prison with the intention of keeping her alive, and eventually selling her body to wealthy clients.

Photo: Searchlight Pictures

In spite of that horrific premise, there’s a comedic mean streak to New that keeps it from getting too grotesque or grim — starting with the film’s opening credits, which don’t kick off until 30 minutes into the film, when Steve makes his move. Stan seamlessly switches from menace to charm in this role. He is not dissimilar to Penn Badgley. You’s Joe Godlberg, albeit less sympathetic. This has been a tradition for Steve. He’s a fully formed amoral monster, but a charming one who dances as he works and likes to banter with his victim. As Noa’s imprisonment continues, her captivity begins to take on the bizarre cadence of dating.

This dynamic is New at its horrific best: In the moments of ambiguity, when Noa, in a desperate bid for survival, starts to believe Steve is taking his time with her because he likes her, and she encourages him to think she might like him too — even suggesting they should start having dinner together, even if that dinner involves human flesh. Cave juxtaposes these scenes to moments of routine consumption. Others with normal meals, not cannibal, are photographed with unsettling closeness. The sound is deafening and makes it clear that consumption can be abused into selfish fuel. Late in the film, Noa and Steve engage in a hypnotic, dreamlike dance that’s played more to the camera than to each other, a scene that could be read as interrogating the viewer’s own form of consumption — will we post a gif of it later? It can be stripped of all its context, and used to fuel our own egos.

Photo by Hulu via Polygon

But there’s a give-and-take in the clever cinematic sleights Cave employs in New’s more entrancing moments. The horrors and dangers of dating go wrong are matched by the beauty that occurs when things work out. When these two leads bleed together, they believe they’re seeing each other for the first time. Cave uses the film’s gore to great effect, although she does so with a gentle touch.

Unfortunately, NewIt abandons this ambiguity for a more straightforward survival plot, which suffers from its inability too closely examine its characters. In spite of the film’s more artful moments, Steve remains an uncomplicated villain, and Noa a largely uncomplicated victim. The film’s moments that suggest it may turn into a fascinating, uncomfortable locked-room drama are replaced by basic thriller beats in which Noa attempts escape as her best friend suspects there may be something amiss. The film ends with New, the film hasn’t done anything more than restating what it made clear at the start: Dating is hell, and women deserve more than to be treated like pieces of meat.

NewIt is Hulu now streams live.