How Fresh subverts a frustrating horror-movie trope in bartender Paul
Bartender Paul is the man we all need to be.
Horror film aficionados around the world tire of rolling their eyes at yet another braless final girl who runs up the stairs where there is no second exit route, and that dummy's absence is just one thing that makes Mimi Cave's Fresh so, well, refreshing.
The blame is not on the victims of these movies: no one deserves to have their ass (or any part of them) surgically removed and sold for a profit against their wishes. And yet, for those of us who love a good thriller, we can't help but grimace when a character makes a distinctly prey-like decision as we've seen it a hundred times before.
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He's way too trusting way too soon; she doesn't want to be rude; they don't listen to their intuition despite several distinct warning signs... the list goes on. The experience of helplessly watching characters run into danger is emotionally exhausting and, frankly, it's so done.
But not in Fresh. In Fresh, no one does anything particularly stupid – sure, they make missteps, but nothing beyond basic human error. Yet one character stands apart as the poster child of How to Behave in a Horror Movie, and that character is Paul (Dayo Okeniyi).
Basically, he does everything right and makes every effort to help without putting himself at risk or – as we see all too often with traditionally masculine characters – trying to be a hero for the sake of being a hero.
Paul is simply a good guy in the right place at the right time. He doesn't go looking for trouble – rather, the situation happens to him. He's literally doing his job when Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and her date Steve (Sebastian Stan) happen to show up at his bar.
Noa casually mentions mutual acquaintance Paul to her best friend Mollie (Jonica T Gibbs) when she recaps her date, and Mollie muses briefly on her brief relationship with him, saying: "Paul? Aw, Paul! I don't remember why we stopped hooking up. He was a good guy."
She's right: he is a good guy, and his behaviour is to be imitated by every self-respecting person in the horror film that is life nowadays. When Noa goes missing, Mollie asks Paul for help. This is when he starts to shine and when Fresh subverts the horror-movie template.
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It comes at the end when Paul displays the most important survival tactic: he listens to his intuition.
Paul tries to help Mollie by following the map on his screenshot to find her, but when he pulls up to the weird-ass, remote bunker house, his warning signs go off and he says (correctly) that "this shit is creepy as f**k".
He takes a second to see if he can locate Mollie without going up to the house, but when he hears a gunshot, he follows his own intuition. He throws the car in reverse and leaves, which is exactly the right call because he would have otherwise been murdered by the Stockholm-Syndroming wifey Ann (Charlotte Le Bon).
Paul even says aloud: "Come on, man, we seen this movie. We don't make it out this bitch alive, you know this."
But Paul's refreshing actions during the finale aren't a one-off as he's shown throughout Fresh avoiding every frustrating trap he could have fallen into.
Like any good bartender, Paul remembers his patrons, especially the women who appear to be on a first date. Paul remembers Noa, but when Mollie shows up and flirts with him in an attempt to get Steve's details, he doesn't immediately hand them over.
He wants to help, but Paul doesn't cave to the thirst trap she tries to set for him. Instead, he redirects the conversation by suggesting she go to the police, which, again, would be a sensible and logical thing for a person to do.
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Of course, it doesn't quite turn out that way as that wouldn't be much of a movie. Paul does try to help her find her missing friend by just doing one small favour that requires almost no effort from him.
This unwittingly leads Mollie to put herself in danger, but Paul reacts to Mollie's disappearance in another sensible way. (Honestly, does he even know he's in a horror movie?)
In any mystery of a potentially criminal situation, the characters must have good sense (not common sense, because it is not, in fact, that common). Paul is sensible, citizen-detective-wise, when he screenshots Mollie's location, which she earlier shared with him "just in case shit goes awry".
Any mildly tech-savvy user knows that when your phone loses service or dies, location services no longer work. He takes this precaution knowing about Noa's disappearance and the result is crucial almost immediately.
He tries to call Mollie when he's closing the bar and when she doesn't answer, he tries to find her location only to see "LOCATION UNAVAILABLE", which leads him into the potentially heroic search escapade we mentioned earlier.
Paul might not be the traditionally defined "hero" of this story, in that he didn't rescue the damsels, but because he knows how to behave in a horror movie, he does make it out this bitch alive – and he's a hero to us as a result.
Fresh is available to watch now on Disney+ in the UK and on Hulu in the US.
