“Fresh” is a nasty, satiric swipe at the predatory nature of dating and how ill-advised any “Just go for it” ethos is for a single woman in the America of today.

Screenwriter Lauryn Kahn and director Mimi Cave take a broad swipe at “Just give me a smile,” sexism and the objectification of women.

Their aim is dark comedy — darker than dark, darker even than “Promising Young Woman.” But the chuckles are mostly in the finale.

Using “patient” to describe this grim horror tale is just being polite for “Could you go any slower?” Any film that starts with a 30 minute+ prologue and ends with a series of “Jesus, isn’t this over?” anti-climaxes is almost bound to frustrate.

The characters are wafer thin “types,” the predicament introduced early and dragged out in ways meant to be excruciating, but the plot turns are more predictable than one might like.

And considering that “predicament,” which has hints of “Misery,” “Hannibal,” “Split” and pretty much any thriller built on a kidnap victim and the awful things an awful person might do to her or him, there’s just a hint of miscasting.

As everybody reviewing this is being coy about that awful hook at the heart of the picture, I’ll join in and limit my complaints about the picture’s fat missing where it’s needed and turning up where it isn’t — starting with excessive length.

Runway-thin Daisey Edgar-Jones of “Normal People” and TV’s “War of the Worlds,” plays Noa, a city 20something who laments her relationship status more than she should, at least according to her gay BFF Mollie (Jojo T. Jones of TV’s “Twenties”).

“You do NOT need a man” falls on deaf ears, which is why Noa swipes right and winds up with one boor after another. But this guy at the supermarket, while tossing old pick-up lines around, at least delivers them cute and smooth.

“You live around here? Because I live over…on aisle six.”

Steve, given an oily, older-man polish by Sebastian Stan of “Pam & Tommy” and the Marvel Universe, gets her number, gets a date and gets to wake up with Noa, who snaps a picture to let Mollie know that she’s finally met a charmer. Steve is courtly, genteel, considerate, a doctor doing “my second residency,” which he looks almost young enough to pull off.

Mollie’s getting a “stranger danger” vibe, but naive Noa leaps right into the “let’s go away for the weekend” pitch. A little cell phone silence and cyber-stalking raises Mollie’s antennae higher. But by then, it’s too late. Noa’s in somebody’s remote, luxurious lair, one with a basement that could be AnyDungeon. What might Steve have in store?

“I’m gonna tell you, but you’re gonna freak out.”

That’s just the set-up, the first act. “Fresh” is about Noa’s dilemma, how she works that problem and Mollie’s efforts to find a friend who has lost control of her phone.

Stan brings a real relish to his captor character, dancing about to early MTV (“Obsession” and “Restless Heart”) hits, calmly taunting Noa, lightly scolding her when she doesn’t “relax” and just go along with his heinous plans like “the others.”

Cave’s stylish but sluggish debut manages a surprise or two, but botches thriller basics. She lingers over the clues Noa and/or Mollie pick up, but skips giving any hint of Noa’s mettle or cunning. The “ticking clock” hanging over her is gruesome and urgent, but she seems numbed to it and the picture’s pacing underscores that. Lots of cute camera angles and shock-shots of what’s in that house and what Noa is fated to become take the place of urgency.

The “dating is deadly” metaphor is introduced, and lip service is paid to not letting “victim blaming” enter into anybody’s thinking. But that feels shoehorned in.

The casting is problematic in a couple of ways, the least of which is the 15 year age difference/sophistication gap that our lonely waif never picks up on.

Although the genre isn’t really my thing and this particular entry in it is more “Human Centipede” than I care for, most of these quibbles wouldn’t matter if the picture clipped along, which it doesn’t. All that screen time, and we know virtually nothing about anybody in this — victim, villain, best friend or otherwise.

That dulls whatever edge this satire has, and in a movie like “Fresh,” “cutting” is the whole point.

Rating: R for strong and disturbing violent content, some bloody images, language throughout, some sexual content and brief graphic nudity

Cast: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Sebastian Stan, Charlotte LeBon, Dayo Okeniyi and Jojo T. Gibbs

Credits: Directed by Mimi Cave, scripted by Lauryn Kahn. A Searchlight Pictures release.

Running time: 1:54