Searching WebMD is a beast for many people, and Control Freak knows this well. The Hulu original horror film chronicles the story of a motivational speaker, Val (Kelly Marie Tran), who, while preparing for an important upcoming tour, is plagued by an insatiable itch — a literal one. As Val confronts her past while incessantly scratching a spot under her hair, she is met with annoyance from her husband, Robbie (Miles Robbins), and seeks solace in her aunt (Kieu Chinh). It’s a movie about literally getting under your skin, or trying to, and it is sometimes effective in achieving this goal.
Control Freak’s Visual & Sonic Build Is Its Greatest Strength
The Scratching Noises Are Deeply Unsettling
Val is psychologically tortured from the first frames of Control Freak, and director Shal Ngo immediately employs sound and unnerving visuals to catapult us into her psyche. With no exposition, the film’s cold open cuts between Val’s motivational speaker work and a surrealistic image of her drowning. Soon, the soundscape devolves into an incessant sea of staticky, scratching noises. Coupled with some flashes of unsettling imagery as Val pictures the world around her devolving into an insect and demon-filled landscape, this layering of sound and image is fairly effective.
The film withholds a lot from us, refusing to give its terror an easy explanation. While at times this made me long to know Val better, its minimalist exposition also helped connect us with her internal state. Val, a Vietnamese American woman, is consistently misunderstood and undermined by her white husband and best friend. At the same time, she drives herself crazy trying to unpack what is and is not real. In this regard, the lack of explanation grounds us in her reality of disbelief.
The meaning behind the horror visuals comes to a head in the movie’s momentum-building third act. As Val takes increasingly extreme measures to confront her demons, more of her own troubled past is revealed. Though the main mystical antagonist is pretty conventional in its visual effects, the inclusion of multiple sound and visual elements throughout the film and, especially, during the final act pulled a lot of loose strands together, telling a compelling narrative about mental illness and generational trauma.
Control Freak’s Repeтιтious Motifs Flatten The Plot
And Its Themes Are Lost
From its very first frames, Ngo establishes that he will be using the images and sounds of scratching as a recurring device. These repeated moments — of Val drowning, of her scratching her head while driving in her car down the same bridge — create a rhythmic effect that hints at the relentlessness of itchiness (a feeling both literal and figurative in this film). At a surface level, these inclusions work well.
Ngo’s emphasis on the soundscape was strong in points, but overall drew the focus away from the layered and complex theming it attempted.
At some point, though, Control Freak focused too much on its rhythms and not enough on its themes. It takes a long time for the movie to introduce a pivotal scene involving Val’s dad, a moment that will shift the meaning behind the demon and itching haunting the protagonist and finally shed more light on the past. However, the film takes about two full acts to get here, and leading up to that point, we are left with a pretty flat plot that prioritizes the general spooky vibe over character depth.
The movie is also a little bit thematically muddled. After devoting a far-too-extended time to establishing the character’s physical itching, Control Freak then tries to do a lot, throwing in themes of immigration, mental illness, PTSD, perfectionism, and much more. It is the film’s infertility plot that I found particularly lacking, and a bit shoehorned into the movie. Ngo’s emphasis on the soundscape was strong in points, but overall drew the focus away from the layered and complex themes it attempted.
Kelly Marie Tran Struggles To Sustain This Highly Psychological Film
Ultimately, Control Freak is a psychological horror film — or at least, that is what it is supposed to be. To make it really gel, the film needed to have a stellar performance at its core. For me, Tran fell short. Even as the visuals coalesced into shocking proportions, I never felt Val transcended to a believable level of psychological torture that came from a deeply internal place. Ultimately, Tran’s lackluster performance further weakened what was already a generally unbalanced film.
