Control Freak Is A Promising But Underbaked Horror Movie
Kelly Marie Tran scratches a self-destructive itch in the Hulu horror film.
"You're not good enough. You're too stupid, too ugly. You are worthless. Now, raise your hand if the voice in your head has ever said any of these things to you.” In this winkingly on-the-nose opening monologue, Control Freak introduces Kelly Marie Tran as motivational speaker Valerie Nguyen, the so-called queen of good habits. She specializes in teaching people how to curb their self-destructive impulses; a skill that has made her rich and famous, but not particularly pleasant in her private life. In the mansion she shares with her husband Robbie (Miles Robbins), she is very clearly the one who calls the shots, living up to the film’s title as she prepares for an international tour.
One leg of this tour will take her to Asia for the first time, a goal that promises to expand her audience, but forces her to get back in touch with her semi-estranged family. In order to get an international visa, she must find a copy of her birth certificate, which her unhelpful father (Toan Le) has seemingly hidden away. As the pressure mounts, Valerie succumbs to an uncharacteristically distasteful new habit, compulsively scratching the back of her head until it bleeds.
Written and directed by Shal Ngo (who previously made the post-apocalyptic tween movie The Park), Control Freak is the latest of Hulu’s lower-budget horror originals, following titles like Clock and Mr Crocket. This slate offers a welcome training ground for up-and-coming horror filmmakers, but unsurprisingly, the results are mixed. In this case Ngo arrives with a promising concept that runs a little too long at 104 minutes — Control Freak would possibly be better suited to the compact format of an episodic anthology series like The Twilight Zone or Cabinet of Curiosities. Either that, or this story needs a tighter structure built around its lead character, who spends much of the film’s runtime building up to a predictable breakdown, lingering too long on the repetitive gross-out factor of her scratching habit.
Drawing from Vietnamese folklore, Control Freak is part supernatural horror, part family drama, pushing its protagonist to breaking point as she reluctantly reexamines her troubled childhood. Valerie’s mother passed away young, and her father clearly wasn’t a very positive force in her life. As an adult she’s found tremendous professional success, but in doing so she’s shaped herself into a rather unforgiving person. In private she keeps her husband at arm’s length, retreating to such intense levels of independence that it becomes a kind of self-sabotage.
Unlike the typical protagonist for a tale about (as you can probably infer from that introductory monologue) a form of supernatural possession, Valerie isn’t remotely helpless. Defining herself by her can-do attitude, she tries to solve her new affliction in increasingly ambitious ways. But as her life begins to fall apart, it becomes clear that she’s just trying to treat a worrying symptom, not tackle the underlying cause.
Kelly Marie Tran is the highlight of an otherwise underwhelming horror movie.
As expected, Kelly Marie Tran delivers a convincing performance as the tough and self-assured Valerie; her second foray into horror after an episode of the underrated Hulu anthology series Monsterland. Her role offers some well-observed commentary about the hypocrisy of self- help influencers, because while Valerie’s fans idolize her for her self-control and inspirational advice, you wouldn’t describe her as happy and fulfilled. Control Freak also represents a fresh angle on a horror subgenre that typically focuses on Christian rituals and beliefs, exploring a supernatural possession narrative involving Buddhist traditions and thorny intergenerational conflicts within a Vietnamese-American family.
Elsewhere though, the surrounding material is pretty thin — including the fairly basic characterization for Valerie’s husband, the film’s secondary lead. Shal Ngo works with some reliable ideas here: generational trauma, monsters that prey on emotional vulnerability, unequal marital dynamics. But Control Freak just isn’t particularly adept at creating an atmosphere of dread and fear, either as a psychological drama or as a supernatural horror story.
When we reach the startlingly gory and disturbing final act it almost feels like we’re entering a different film, confirming that Ngo definitely has the juice as a director of hide-your-eyes horror setpieces. Weirdly though, the film then backtracks on one of its most shocking elements at the last moment. This uneven finale suggests that while Control Freak benefits from plenty of worthwhile ingredients, it still isn’t fully cooked, making it a mid-range effort in the realm of straight-to-streaming horror.
