Folk horror is one of the most fascinating avenues of the genre, incorporating stories of old that many still believe in wholeheartedly despite any proof of them being true, often disseminated between generations as one of the last vestiges of oral sharing. The overwhelming majority of folk horror stories take place in rural settings surrounded by endless forests of leafless trees and characters adorned in beige fabrics, which immediately differentiates Shal Ngo’s Control Freak from many of its contemporaries. An expansion of Ngo’s short film Control as part of Hulu’s “Bite Size Halloween” season 2, Control Freak sees Star Wars star Kelly Marie Tran as Valerie, a successful self-help author and motivational speaker who tours the globe teaching people how to be better versions of themselves. In the public eye, Valerie seems to have it all — she’s beautiful, she’s confident, she has an answer for every problem, and people look to her every word to figure out what direction to take for their lives.
Alas, behind the scenes, Valerie’s life is nowhere near as perfect as her fans and followers could imagine. She and her husband Robbie (the always fantastic Miles Robbins) are struggling to conceive a child, her relationship with her family of Vietnamese immigrants is beleaguered, she’s struggling to deal with the mysterious and tragic passing of her mother from childhood, she’s fallen into a compulsive Itch-Scratch cycle on her scalp that’s escalating so intensely that she’s clawing chunks of her scalp out with her fingernails, and she’s seemingly plagued by tiny, skittering bugs wherever she goes. As she delivers lectures to adoring crowds about how to gain better control of their lives, Val’s control of her own slips further and further between her fingers — bloodied cuticles and all.
The effectiveness of Control Freak hinges almost entirely on Tran’s performance, and fortunately, this horrifying vehicle further demonstrates that she remains one of the most underutilized performers currently working. Her dedication to the psychological and physical horrors plaguing her character is so strong, she can almost convince us that the unfortunately unrealistic CGI bugs are actually covering her entire body. She learns that after the Vietnam war, her mother was also tormented by a mysterious itching, which turns Control Freak into a bit of a mystery. Is Valerie’s itching cycle a manifestation of mental illness, inherited trauma, or something rooted in Buddhist folklore? Or is it all of these things at once? Just as Val struggles to discern reality from the supernatural, so too does the audience, which may forestall some audiences from fully giving themselves over to the narrative.
It’s become trendy in recent years for filmmakers to explore these themes in horror, but it’s not often that a film attempts to play with them all in one story. Bits of Hereditary, Relic, and even the coming-of-age Pixar film Turning Red resonate as Val continually loses control of her life, with grotesque intrusions of body horror and a truly disgusting sound design that will have you convinced every loose strand of hair tickling your arm is a creepy-crawly using your body as a bridge to another land.
For the most part, Control Freak is effective in its thematic explorations, but the inconsistent pacing is sadly a bug, and not a feature. Ngo certainly had enough material to expand Control into a feature film, but had 10-15 minutes been shaved off of the film’s runtime, this would have been an airtight, must-watch streaming hit. Characters pop in to provide answers at times that feel a little too convenient, “it was just a dream” scares happen a little too often to not be tiresome, and the film’s insistence on jump scare tropes wears thin, but the further we dive into Val’s tortured psyche, the less distracting they become — and because Kelly Marie Tran is so damn compelling, it’s easy to look past the structural shortcomings.
Val’s unwillingness to take a step back and deal with her issues, instead forging ahead despite every sign telling her that her current way of living is unsustainable, is painfully understandable, and seeing her anguished turmoil grow stronger and escape the confines of just her own negative self-thinking is woefully relatable to anyone who has had an episode of self-destructive spiraling. The more our titular Control Freak is forced to reckon with the reality that she has never truly been in control, the wilder and more gruesome the film becomes. The advantageous tonal shifts do feel a bit unmotivated at times, but the chance to see Tran face off with a truly fantastic practical monster (especially for a direct-to-Hulu release), is certainly an entertaining watch. Ngo has proven to be a formidable new voice in horror, and his debut feature is one hell of an introduction.
Control Freak bites off more than it can chew at times, but it’s still a feast of ideas worth consuming.
