With feminist thriller Fresh now streaming on Disney+, Christobel Hastings spoke to its star Daisy Edgar-Jones about the horrors of modern dating, dance scenes with Sebastian Stan and the real love story at the heart of the film. Warning: this story contains spoilers.

In the era of modern dating, nearly everyone you meet has a horror story to tell. A self-obsessed person, perhaps, who didn’t ask a single question. A clueless individual who asked every offensive question. A date who tried to buy you dinner with a magazine coupon. A date who got drunk and started sobbing about their ex. A string of people who looked absolutely nothing like their selfies. The list goes on.

But there are horror stories and then there are horror stories. And Disney’s twisted new thriller Fresh is a cautionary tale that might just persuade you to swear off dating for good. That is, unless you’ve got a cast-iron constitution.

Written by Lauryn Kahn and directed by Mimi Cave, Fresh follows Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones), a weary twenty-something who has endured an exhaustingly bad run on dating apps. Case in point: Chad, a crashingly dull man who Noa has the misfortune of having dinner with in the opening scene. Not only does he drape his scarf all over the noodles, but he insults her dress sense (“The women in our parents’ generation just cared more about how they looked”), takes food home in a doggy bag without paying and takes rejection so badly that he calls Noa a “stuck-up bitch” when they part ways.

Noa’s luck appears to take a turn, though, when she meets Steve (Sebastian Stan), a handsome, slightly goofy doctor in the fresh produce aisle of a Portland supermarket. He offers her cotton candy-flavoured grapes, flashes a charming smile, and before we know it, our unlucky-in-love heroine is heading off for a romantic weekend with a seemingly normal, kind, single fellow. 

Read the full feature here.