Melissa M. Dunn 
God, when did dating become such a meat market? This is pretty much the main gag of Costs, a clever and bloody metaphor for the seemingly endless horrors of modern romance rooted in a plot just outrageous enough to be plausibly true.
normal peopleDaisy Edgar-Jones is Noa, a girl wandering the arid wasteland of online apps and picking up the worst tumbleweeds. (A peculiar winner in a draped scarf patiently explains the art of womanhood to her, then splits the check and takes her leftovers). She despairs for her best friend, Mollie (Jojo T. Gibbs), never to find someone half normal, but everything changes with a cute encounter over grapes at a grocery store: Steve (Sebastian Stan) has great hair and gets his jokes, a reconstructive surgeon who does a mean Old Fashioned, always holds the door open, and talks lovingly about his sister and niece.
Sundance Institute Sebastian Stan and Daisy Edgar-Jones in “Fresh”
It’s been almost thirty minutes now and the title credits haven’t rolled; if it was a short, it would be a romantic comedy. But that’s not where director Mimi Cave is heading in her feature debut, and when Steve invites Noa over for the weekend at his country house, the screaming invisible violins come in. What if Noa wants to leave, she’ll have to do a lot more than order a Lyft.
Poor reception is one of the script’s most outdated tropes (when a man in a movie casually says the wi-fi in the woods is spotty, go ahead and pack a body bag). And Stan’s character looks like an amalgamation of all the handsome dead-eyed charmers that came before him, from Screamfrom Skeet Ulrich to Christian Bale in American psycho – the guy with a golden smile and nothing but emptiness underneath.
But Edgar-Jones, who above all must have been delicate and sad in normal people, brings a soft air of steel to Noa; she doesn’t scream slasher chum, but neither is she an unlikely Houdini, and when she realizes her best hope of getting home is to play Steve’s game better than he can, she locks herself . (Gibbs’ Mollie also has a clever trick, though you wish there was more to her than the required best friend rescue mission).
In a world where get out and Promising young woman have already rewritten the model of social satire as a hard-R horror show, the messages in Costs (which begins streaming on Hulu on March 4) aren’t particularly new or incisive, and the final scenes fall into midnight movie silliness. Still, Cave has a smart, elegant way of storytelling that somehow makes a film built on bonesaws and grotesquery feel almost airy. It’s a nightmare out there; sometimes you just have to bite off more than you can chew. Category B
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