Fresh Kills Leaves the Heart Beating

Fresh Kills feels more like the long dead. The movie is a postmortem for a decomposing family. Ties to the mob lifestyle poisoned them years ago, and writer-director-star Jennifer Esposito maps out the slow death that ensues in her first feature-length film. Despite a few stumbles, Fresh Kills has solid parts, thanks mostly to a talented cast. However, it never turns into the dramatic slaughter its title implies. At best, it pins its audience who await the inevitable outcome.

The movie focuses on Connie and Rose Larusso. Their father Joe is a rising mob boss, while their mother Francine is resigned to the lies and dead ends that life inflicts on her. As the film jumps through the years, viewers get to see the affect this existence has on the young girls as they grow into vastly different women. Getting older makes it harder to pretend their family is normal as well as ignore the criminal connections they have, while the time is fast approaching when Rose must make a choice between resigning herself to this way of life or escaping.

Fresh Kills is a movie about the lives of women. The ways they’re trapped by tradition alongside societal expectations drives a great deal of the drama. Rose is a young lady who wants more than what her situation says she can have. It isn’t simply avoiding the criminal aspect of her family; she wants more out of life than being a bored stay-at-home spouse on Staten Island. Yet, everyone around her insists that’s all she should ever expect out of life. There’s a cruelty to such scenes that can be truly heartbreaking, especially considering how Rose’s aspirational feminism is treated like shameful naivety.

As such, it’s unfortunate Fresh Kills mostly feels like binge watching a TV show but skipping to the juiciest parts of the story. Consequently, a number of narrative threads need to be woven together by inference, and one of the more dramatic moments in the whole film is initially difficult to understand since it seems to come out of nowhere until one deciphers the babbling of a distraught character. That’s not to suggest Fresh Kills is incomprehensible, but as it skips over events to hurry through time, certain things need to be briefly deduced rather than casually observed.

The other side of the coin is that it’s hard to care about what happens to certain individuals. Fresh Kills features a carnival of human garbage. The main character Rose isn’t so much trapped as imprisoned by a family of abusive bullies alongside an orbiting onslaught of misogynistic individuals, unaware woman are human beings. While this certainly creates a lot of drama, Fresh Kills becomes less about being caught in the undertow that is a criminal lifestyle as much as it is a simple tale of abuse that has mafia elements to spice things up, and those seasonings amount to stale clichés which don’t add much to the story.

It’s a shame because the potential is there for some interesting dilemmas, especially given the solid cast. However, most of the movie involves Emily Bader (Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin) carried along by the current of events rather than making choices. Although the film is ultimately a build to an obvious confrontation with her family, so much of Fresh Kills is her character being badgered into backing down it starts to feel like someone kicking a sad puppy up and down a soccer field. As much as the audience will want to see her finally stand up for herself, it’s an exhausting watch getting to that point.

Still, that shouldn’t undercut the quality performances by the three leads. Emily Bader, Jennifer Esposito (Summer of Sam), and Odessa A’zion (Hellraiser (2022)) do carry Fresh Kills. Each character, in their own way, is an intriguing look at tragically entwined people. The three performers do an admirable job of bringing to life the anxiety riddled conflicted Rose, her volcanic sister Connie, and their resigned mother. They are each a dramatic mess, ably portrayed by their respective performers. Emily Bader does a particularly amazing job of being constantly on the verge of a nervous breakdown, while Odessa A’zion has some captivating moments where the ugliness of her character really comes out.

Since Fresh Kills is focused on the women in its story, the male characters take an understandable backseat. That said, there are plenty of opportunities for Domenick Lombardozzi to provide a quiet, contemplative brute who occasionally shows a softness regarding his children. Although this does feel like a stock character for him after similar roles in 2019’s The Irishman and Reptile last year, not to mention several TV shows (Reacher, The Wire, etc.) — consistency is a mark of quality. Outside of him, though, none of the other male characters really have much presence except when they need to push the plot forward. This makes them all largely forgettable.

Nostalgia is certainly an element of Fresh Kills. In that respect, the film does an admirable job of capturing the various years it skips through. From costumes to TV shows, audiences, especially those who can recall the eras, will feel the time periods.

There are a few moments of cinematic flare which show Jennifer Esposito has some clever ideas on how to enliven simple scenes. However, the film eventually settles into standard shots. While these still look good, the energy from the movie’s opening eventually subsides. Combined with a loss of narrative momentum, this makes the middle of Fresh Kills a march through mundane territory. It isn’t until some predictable climaxes hit the movies regains some vitality.

There’s a truly intriguing concept at the heart of Fresh Kills. Jennifer Esposito solidly steers this tale of rage, alienation, and the unspoken rules that trap women. Emily Bader is captivatingly tragic as a young woman in a living nightmare. It’s just a shame Fresh Kills feels like a highlight reel featuring the most dramatic parts of a television season. I want the whole show.