CONTROL FREAK (2025)

Studio:   Hulu
Director: Shal Ngo
Writer:   Shal Ngo
Producer: David Worthen Brooks, Arbi Pedrossian, Jenna Cavelle, Shaum S. Sengupta
Stars:    Kelly Marie Tran, Miles Robbins

Review Score:

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Summary:

Obsessed with scratching a nagging itch on her head, a motivational speaker’s haunted family history leads her to suspect she may be possessed by a figure from folklore.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

While dealing with the mounting stress of an upcoming world tour as well as the anniversary of her mother Chi’s drowning death when she was a child, motivational speaker Valerie “Vy” Nguyen becomes obsessed with scratching a nagging itch growing on the back of her head. Vy also begins seeing strange swarms of ants, some of which are hallucinatory visions and nightmares. Vy consults a doctor who tells her the compulsive scratching may have a psychological component that is hereditary.

In need of her birth certificate, Vy visits her Aunt Thuy at the nail salon her aunt owns. Thuy tells Vy that her father, a former soldier who is now a monk, has the family mementos she is looking for. During a later visit to the salon, Vy asks about her mother, to which Thuy responds by cryptically claiming Chi was cursed. Thuy also warns Vy to stay away from her father.

Vy visits her father Sang at the Golden Grove Monastery. Vy notices an eerie illustration of an ant-like creature. Sang identifies the figure as Sanshi, a parasitic ghost that poisons its human host with insatiable urges until it consumes that person’s body and soul.

While acquiring her birth certificate from a storage unit, Vy has another haunting vision of ants. Vy also finds old family photos showing her mother with a rash on her skin.

As continued nightmares cause her to consider she might be demonically possessed like her mother supposedly was, Vy overhears her husband Robbie telling Vy’s tour manager Crystal about his concern that something is wrong with Vy. Robbie’s worries grow when he finds the bloody gash widening on Vy’s scalp. Robbie ends up leaving their house after he discovers Vy has been secretly taking birth control pills despite their supposed commitment to having a baby.

Sang visits Vy to tell her she is infected with the Sanshi because it is in her blood. After drugging Vy with tea, Sang takes money from Vy’s purse and leaves while warning Vy she will end up like her mother.

At knifepoint, Vy later confronts Sang for the truth about her mother’s death. Sang claims he inadvertently summoned a demon through acts of war he committed during the Vietnam Conflict. He passed the Sanshi to Vy’s mother Chi, and the more they hurt themselves, the more it grew. Because the spirit can only be killed by drowning, Sang explains that once Chi was fully possessed, she tried to drown Vy to stop the Sanshi from infecting her, forcing Sang to drown Chi to save Vy’s life.

Vy rushes to the theater for her latest speaking engagement. Vy tries reconciling with Robbie backstage, but Robbie tells Vy he doesn’t believe anything she has to say anymore.

During her presentation, Vy’s compulsive scratches turn into violent contortions. Vy hurries away from her confused audience and returns home to find her father dead.

Vy collapses after putting her finger into the hole opened in the back of her head. When she is rushed to the hospital, the doctor explains to Robbie how Vy gave herself brain damage that could cause hallucinations.

Robbie brings Vy home to recover. Vy tries telling Robbie that she thinks her father put something inside her, but Robbie refuses to listen to Vy’s claims.

Using drugged food to knock him unconscious, Vy restrains Robbie to their bed while she conducts a ritual to summon the Sanshi for a confrontation. Coerced by a taunting doppelganger into considering suicide, Vy uses an electric saw to amputate her right hand so she will no longer be able to scratch her itch.

The Sanshi materializes to assist Vy in sawing off her other hand. Vy uses the opportunity to forcibly saw off the demon’s hand before continuing to hack at the creature.

Vy crawls outside with the Sanshi in pursuit. Vy tackles the creature into her outdoor swimming pool. While wrestling with the Sanshi underwater, Vy sees the demon take on the appearances of her father, mother, and herself as a child. Vy cradles her younger self and begins swimming back up toward the surface.

Having escaped his restraints, Robbie pulls his wife out of the water. Robbie sees Vy cradling an infant with a hole in its head whom she identifies as herself. The infant melts away. The Sanshi’s floating shape disappears too.

Vy later reveals to Robbie that she is pregnant. The couple reconciles and goes on to have the child.

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Review:

Counting from the first frame to the final credit, “Control Freak” runs a dead-even one hour and 44 minutes, which tips toward the long side for a straight-to-streaming psychological drama. Although only two actors receive title card billing, over a dozen different performers feature in the film. Flashback scenes add a second time period, with Kentucky filling in for locations that include a nail salon, a monastery, a theater, a hospital, and even a Vietnamese rice paddy.

I’m tallying these numbers to show that “Control Freak” has a lot going on for what’s ostensibly a tightly controlled spotlight on one woman. Yet despite this surprising scope stuffed into a comparatively contained story, the uneven experience ends up feeling so fleeting that I’m uncertain what needs to be said about the movie other than a head-tilting “eh.”

Valerie “Vy” Nguyen (Kelly Marie Tran) makes a lucrative living as a motivational speaker. Life coaches don’t often earn celebrity status quite like she does, as evidenced by her spacious home, deeply populated management team, and throngs of adoring fans flocking to venues all over the globe to hear Vy speak during her major world tour.

Vy could use someone to pick up and pick through pieces of her own life, however. Ever since childhood, she’s been haunted by the death of her mother, and the mystery of exactly how it happened. The upcoming anniversary of that event exacerbates stress piling up from the tour, not to mention pressure from Vy’s husband Robbie (Miles Robbins) to start raising a family of their own. Could these be the reasons behind a growing itch on the back of Vy’s head, causing constant, compulsive scratches that gradually grow into gouges?

Or could the culprit be a Sanshi? Movies revolving around possession often transpose routine devils and demons for mythical monsters from cultural folklore, which is precisely what “Control Freak” does. According to Vy’s father Sang, a drug-addicted former soldier who became a monk in his later life, a Sanshi is a hungry, parasitic ghost who poisons its human host with uncontrollable urges until it ultimately consumes that person’s body and soul. Sang warns Vy that she inherited the same curse that afflicted her troubled mother, and if she isn’t cautious, her sanity will eventually shatter too.

Making matters worse, visions of ant swarms, some of which are real while others are nightmarish hallucinations, begin haranguing Vy as well. With reality seemingly unraveling around her, Vy isn’t sure what to believe. All she knows for sure is she has to keep scratching her scalp, even if she is boring a bloody hole straight into her brain.

In 2021, writer/director Shal Ngo’s short film “Control” featured in the second season of Hulu’s “Bite Size Halloween” collection of horror shorts. Even if you didn’t previously know “Control Freak” started as a six-minute movie that was built out into this feature, you might have guessed it from the “this could have been an e-mail” energy pulsing throughout the padding. This looks like a clear-cut case of “should have been a short,” which “Control Freak” originally was, and it shows.

Other than the bloat of bland sequences stretching out the runtime, it’s not like there’s anything overtly “bad” about the film. It’s merely an unnoticeable movie where everything from acting to effects can basically be described as “fine.”

Kelly Marie Tran is fine as Valerie. Character studies usually require an interesting character to study, but Vy is only a common stereotype: an outwardly successful professional struggling internally with a past trauma that plagues her present, so there’s no room for Tran to emote anything extraordinary that similar heroines haven’t already done in similar circumstances. Miles Robbins’s husband is underwritten to the point of being indescribable, leaving him with middling material he can chew with his gums since sharp teeth aren’t required.

At its core, “Control Freak” combines its Vietnamese-inspired mythos and Valerie’s nagging itch into a metaphor for baggage brought by haunted family history. This makes for an earnest fable whose intent at examining one person’s fragile psyche would be all well and good if it weren’t for the formulaic familiarity and drawn-out drama holding the movie to a slow speed. Cryptic claims. A collection of newspaper clippings to fill in a few blanks. Serendipitous timing of certain events. It’s all too scripted to ever feel like a real, harrowing situation where audience empathy could elevate a passive viewing experience into an intensely vicarious one.

“Control Freak” colors within the lines of Hulu’s typical template for a slow-burn thriller with a supernatural element, no more, no less. For undemanding viewers, a minor message bundled into forgettable frights might indeed be “fine” for a fire-and-forget selection used as background entertainment. For heftier horror, you’ll need stronger medicine than the watered-down remedy “Control Freak” provides.

Review Score: 45

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