CONTROL FREAK Review: Kelly Marie Tran Elevates Psychological Horror

Eight years ago, toxic fandom of the Star Wars kind almost derailed Kelly Marie Tran’s career.

 

And while that rabid fan response led to a painfully reduced role in the last big-screen Star Wars entry, The Rise of Skywalker, Tran’s career continued, most noticeably as the voice of the title character in Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon four years ago, and now, finally, three prominent roles set to be released this year, Andrew Ahn and James Schamus's remake of The Wedding Banquet (out next month), the well-received, SXSW-premiering Forge, and writer-director Shal Ngo’s (The Box) flawed, if often compelling, psychological horror film, Control Freak, for Hulu.

 

When we first meet Tran’s character, Valerie “Val” Nguyen (pronounced "Win"), in Control Freak, she’s in full-on motivational speaker mode, charming an offscreen audience with a rapid-fire flurry of self-help mantras, aphorisms, and platitudes, each of which a willing, compliant audience accepts uncritically. Val claims her pep talk can change lives, using herself, and the financial and personal success that’s followed, as her chief selling point.

 

Ironies of obvious ironies, of course, but it’s all a facade. Indeed, Val might be the “control freak” of the title, stage-managing every element of her personal and private life, with the help of her executive assistant, Crystal (Callie Johnson), and her producer-husband, Robbie (Miles Robbins),  to a level of near perfection unlikely to stand the test of time or the real world, at least not permanently. She also can’t stop a persistent, maddening itch on her head or the ants she seems to see wherever she goes and whatever she does. 

 

Add — or rather subtract — a shaky, unresolved past involving her long-deceased mother and her equally troubled father, Sang (Toan Le), a Vietnamese War veteran, refugee, and currently, a practicing Buddhist monk at a nearby monastery. Sang talks a good game about material possessions and comforts, how the accrual of same only leads to the kind of soul-hunger only adhering to strict Buddhist practices can assuage, but it’s just as obvious Sang uses to hide himself from the world, his guilt-ridden past, and his unshakable belief that Val, like her mother before her, has been cursed or infected by a demonic parasite feeding on her soul.

 

Val’s downward spiral, including textbook psychological deterioration and eventually, near disintegration into madness, follow a well-worn, familiar pattern, adhering to tried-and-true horror tropes. As Val loses the control that defines her, both her marriage to a sympathetic, if clueless husband, and an upcoming make-or-break book tour are threatened.

 

Well-versed in the horror genre, Ngo dips into the usual bag of cinematic horror tricks, from shadowy interiors, jump/shock scares, and hurtling, frenetic camerawork, often attached to Tran's character via a body rig, not so subtlety suggesting the unseen demon’s invasive, corruptive presence in Val's life. 

 

A well-integrated mix of practical effects and CGI, the purposely ill-defined demon, a swirling mass of shadows (insert night terrors reference here), long-fingered, claw-like hands, and a gaping, ravenous mouth, proves the axiom that the less we see of a supernatural manifestation, the more disturbing and ultimately, the more terrifying it'll be. It's all the more effective as it repeatedly attempts to overcome Val's increasingly futile resistance.

 

To his credit, Ngo distinguishes Control Freak from similarly themed and premised horror entries by interweaving Vietnamese folklore into the film. At a minimum, Control Freak’s narrative novelty elevates it from also-ran, forgettable horror entry to one worth a horror fan’s time and concentration.

 

Throw in Tran’s all-in, committed, go-for-broke performance and that’s not just one, but two solid reasons to give Control Freak a try this weekend or next.