Directed by Shal Ngo — Screenplay by Shal Ngo.
Shal Ngo’s generically titled body horror flick Control Freak follows Valerie (played by Kelly Marie Tran), a motivational speaker, who, in her first scene, talks to her audience about rejecting and resisting the voice inside of your head that keeps you down. Valerie, who is struggling with a constant itch in her scalp, is quite popular, it seems, as she is getting ready to go on a tour of Asia. This world tour requires her to go find her birth certificate, which forces her to face her troubled family history. When she meets with her father, who fought in the Vietnam War and is now a Buddhist monk, she is told that the itch, as well as the frequent visions of both ants and a dark figure, is a direct result of a demonic parasite that will attach itself to a host and will continue to gnaw away at them until they’re all gone. Valerie initially refuses to believe her father, but when things start to escalate, she realizes she has to do something drastic.
Although this film was, of course, in production long before Coralie Fargeaat and Demi Moore brought body horror movies back into the mainstream with The Substance, it is, admittedly, a little bit tricky to watch a new body horror film released so soon after the aforementioned Oscar-winning film and not have slightly higher expectations than you may have had beforehand. Control Freak is by no means a Cronenberg (David or Brandon, for that matter) film, which is to say that the body horror (and the themes that complement it) never gets to the same gnarly or thought-provoking quality that Fargeat aimed for (and elegantly succeeded in reaching).
Let’s start with the body horror and creature material. As someone who saw firsthand how troublesome an ant infestation can be less than a year ago, I found the scenes with ants crawling en masse around our protagonist (or being projectile vomited out) to be extremely uncomfortable, which is to say that it did its job competently. I also think the demonic creature design eventually gets to be quite disturbing, but, at the same time, it is kept in the dark for way too long. As a result of this, the film’s relatively slow first half gets to feel quite repetitive. As for the deeper narrative themes and ideas, there is really not much new here. Shal Ngo’s film touches on the same family trauma, ‘is-it-in-your-head-or-actually-real?’ elements you’ve seen more than a dozen times before (and done better). The film reminded me of everything from Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby and Parker Finn’s Smile films to Iris K. Shim’s Umma and Babak Anvari’s Wounds.
And yet, despite the fact that its ideas and formula are not particularly novel, I thought it mostly got across the finish line successfully. This is because the more bonkers horror stuff is turned up in the second half with some truly intense and disturbing scenes, where it goes from being about an itch that she will do anything to scratch violently to being about preventing herself from being able to scratch her own itch by any means necessary. One of the main reasons why I ended up mostly liking this was because of its lead performance. Kelly Marie Tran has gotten a tough deal from Hollywood ever since the toxic, vocal minority unjustly went after her for her good work in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and so it is really nice to see her lead a film here with the kind of spirited performance, which she is capable of delivering. Tran’s performance was the main highlight for me, and her performance paired with occasional body horror highlights elevates this film a fair bit — at least to the extent that this is a mild recommendation from me, if you’re looking for something to watch from your own home that can, ahem, scratch that body horror itch.
6 out of 10
– Review written by Jeffrey Rex Bertelsen.
I'm Jeffrey Rex 