FREAKS (2018)

Studio:      Well Go USA
Director:    Adam Stein, Zach Lipovsky
Writer:      Zach Lipovsky, Adam Stein
Producer:  Adam Stein, Zach Lipovsky, Jordan Barber, Mitchell Waxman
Stars:     Emile Hirsch, Bruce Dern, Grace Park, Amanda Crew, Lexy Kolker, Aleks Paunovic, Michelle Harrison

Review Score:

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Summary:

After extraordinary abilities begin to manifest, a curious girl uncovers the truth behind why her paranoid father forces them to hide from the outside world.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Because he possesses superhuman powers that are illegal, Henry Lewis lives in hiding with his daughter Chloe. As long as he is awake, Henry manifests a protective bubble around the house that slows time, causing seven years to pass in only a few months. In addition to insisting that she never leave their home, Henry routinely prepares Chloe to assume a new identity for eventually moving in with their neighbors The Reeds across the street. Henry’s eyes bleed, which is a telltale sign of abnormally powered people derogatorily referred to as “freaks.”

Believing her birth mother Mary to be dead, Chloe longs for a maternal figure. Although the woman’s identity is initially unknown to her, Chloe inadvertently uses her hidden ability to make two places occupy the same space to briefly conjure a vision of Mary, who is actually imprisoned in a “freak” facility called ‘The Mountain,’ inside Chloe’s closet.

A homemade popup book titled “Mr. Snowcone and the Princess” comes through the mail slot and stokes Chloe’s desire for ice cream. Chloe spies young Harper Reed patronizing Mr. Snowcone’s ice cream truck outside. Chloe opens the door when Harper brings over ice cream, causing Henry to hastily intervene. Harper’s mother Nancy comes to collect her daughter.

Henry locks Chloe in her closet as punishment for opening the door. Chloe uses her ability to simultaneously exist in Harper’s bedroom. Chloe compels Harper to pretend she is Chloe’s mother as part of a make-believe fantasy.

Henry comes home from a supply run covered in blood. Chloe becomes upset that Henry did not bring back ice cream like he promised. Chloe demands to know when Nancy Reed will become her new mother, but Henry continues insisting the outside world is still too dangerous to come out of hiding.

While Henry sleeps, Chloe sneaks outside to visit Mr. Snowcone, who is actually Chloe’s grandfather Alan. Alan takes Chloe to a park where he tries testing Chloe to see if she possesses superhuman powers. The commotion causes a cop to intervene. When the confrontation escalates, Alan stokes Chloe’s fear and compels her to use her powers. Chloe manipulates the cop’s mind to make him walk away.

Alan tells Chloe that her mother possessed special gifts that frightened people. Alan adds that he and Mary once tried to destroy The Mountain, but Mary was captured when Henry chose to go into hiding instead of using his powers to harm Mary’s captors. Alan explains that he wants to rescue Mary. Claiming they can only see each other when Henry is asleep, Alan gives Chloe a baggie of powder to use for drugging her dad.

Back at home, Chloe angrily confronts Henry over lying to her about the outside world. Chloe conjures another vision of Mary, but Mary refuses to believe Chloe is real.

Chloe watches a TV interview with FBI agent Cecilia Ray. Ray discusses being in town to investigate reports of an “abnormal” minor. The program also details how abnormals/freaks were branded weapons of mass destruction and relocated to The Mountain after destroying Dallas ten years earlier.

Chloe uses her coexistence ability to intrude on Harper’s sleepover. Upset over Chloe entering uninvited, Harper and the other girls tease Chloe for being a motherless freak.

Chloe jumps to another vision of Mary in The Mountain. Mary explains that she isn’t dead and isn’t actually inside Chloe’s closet. Chloe tells Mary that she wants Nancy to be her new mom. Mary tearfully agrees that Chloe and Henry should move on.

Henry stops Chloe from going across the street to see Nancy. Chloe wishes for Henry to die. Henry tells Chloe she will regret that wish when there is no one around to protect her.

Chloe drugs Henry’s drink with Alan’s poison, but Henry spots the powder. A chase ensues. Chloe uses her powers to make Henry fall unconscious. Chloe begins bleeding from her eye.

Chloe prepares to go to Nancy Reed when Alan intervenes. Alan tells Chloe he can take her to her real mother instead.

Posing as a priest, Alan takes Chloe to meet with Agent Ray in a diner as part of a plot to gain access to The Mountain. While Ray calls the ADF for backup, Chloe argues with Alan about using her as bait. Leo the cook overhears the argument. Alan stabs Leo in his eye to make it bleed. ADF agents storm the diner and hastily kill Leo. Alan uses his ability to turn invisible to escape with Chloe.

Chloe uses her compulsion power to make Alan take her home, but he forces her out of his head. Henry confronts them in the street in front of their house. Henry uses his time bubble to capture Alan as well as to shield Chloe from an oncoming car.

Henry reveals to Chloe how he used the time bubble to protect them even though it advanced time seven years in a few months. Henry admits he can’t shield Chloe forever, so she convinces him to finally let her live with The Reeds where it will be safer.

Henry brings Chloe to Nancy and Steve Reed with a stack of cash to accelerate their agreement for taking in Chloe. Harper objects to having Chloe as a sister by revealing how Chloe appears in her bedroom. Nancy flips out upon learning Chloe is actually an abnormal. Nancy forces Chloe and Henry to leave.

Back at the house, Chloe conjures Mary inside her closet again. Chloe witnesses a guard at The Mountain taking Mary away.

Determined to protect as well as punish her, Henry boards up the closet with Chloe inside. Chloe compels Henry to nearly puncture his own head with a drill, so he releases his daughter.

Alan informs Henry that Mary isn’t dead, but rather a prisoner at The Mountain. Henry blames Alan for endangering Mary with a suicide mission. The two men argue about appropriating Chloe’s powers to gain access to The Mountain.

Chloe interrupts the argument by conjuring a vision of Nancy reporting their family to an ADF agent as the event simultaneously occurs across the street. Alan warns that they have to kill Nancy and the agent, but Henry refuses to use his abilities to commit murder. Chloe uses her powers to force the agent to stab Nancy in her eye. Henry stops Chloe from causing the agent to shoot himself, but more ADF agents arrive and gun down Nancy across the street.

Chloe returns to her closet where Mary is restrained to a table inside The Mountain. Henry and Alan watch as an executioner prepares to inject Mary. Alan convinces Chloe to rescue her mother by forcing the executioner to inject himself. Chloe then possesses a guard to remotely help her mother escape.

Agent Ray comes to the front door. Henry activates his time bubble, but Chloe insists she cannot break out Mary if time is frozen. Henry agrees to stall Ray with conversation while Chloe continues to help Mary.

Ray reveals she knows Henry’s true identity and also explains that she wants to weaponize Chloe for government use. When the situation goes sideways, Ray shoots Henry in his stomach.

Ray goes upstairs and witnesses Chloe helping Mary escape The Mountain. Ray fires at Chloe but Alan, who had turned invisible, takes the bullet and dies. Chloe then compels Ray to shoot herself.

Chloe collapses from exhaustion after completing Mary’s escape. Henry guns down ADF agents outside while a Hellfire missile bears down on the house. Henry slows time long enough to escape the house with Chloe before it explodes, but then dies from his gunshot wound.

Using her flight ability, Mary arrives at the house and eliminates the remaining ADF agents. Mary proposes finding a new place to hide with Chloe. Chloe counters that they can live anywhere they want and if anyone bothers them, she knows how to make them stop. Mary flies away holding Chloe.

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Review:

Chloe has never known a world outside the four walls of her eccentrically disheveled home. The coverings across each window, items haphazardly strewn about, and dusty shafts of pinhole lighting immediately identify the decorator as a possible conspiracy theorist too busy folding tinfoil hats to be concerned with cleanliness.

For the seven years of her short life, Chloe has lived with “Dad,” an earnestly protective man who may or may not have earned that name through biology. “Freaks” purposefully keeps his initial identity in the dark. For the better part of its first half, “Freaks” purposefully keep most of its details out of arm’s reach.

Chloe longs for the same essentials as any kid her age: a mother to replace the one who died, a little make-believe in her bedroom, and especially ice cream. Breaking Dad’s rules against peeking outside, Chloe regularly spots “Mr. Snowcone’s” frozen treat truck conspicuously parked at the curb. What little glimpse she gets of the bright, blown out street beyond her door suggests somewhere simultaneously dreamy and threatening. It wouldn’t be out of place to see two kids skipping rope in slow motion while echoing Freddy Krueger’s rhyme.

The ominous ice cream man wants Chloe to come for a ride, yet not necessarily for the wicked reasons one might sinisterly suspect. His agenda might not be innocent regardless, but Mr. Snowcone claims he can open Chloe’s eyes to the truth behind the ghost in her closet, the “Leave It to Beaver”-like family across the street, and the blood dripping from Dad’s eyes. Dad assures Chloe he only wants to keep her safe, although the more Chloe’s desire for freedom grows, so does her discontent with Dad’s restrictive ways. What Dad fails to consider is that if Chloe uncovers her connection to his perspective of paranoid protection, there will be no chain capable of leashing her.

Clearly, “Freaks” starts cryptically. So cryptically in fact that the mind game of discerning who is really who and what is really what may make the impatient hit their internal Snooze buttons out of annoyance for the breadcrumb build.

Don’t succumb to sleepiness. Immersion comes from submitting to the film’s mystery and allowing its world to gradually bloom around you, exactly as it unfolds for Chloe. “Freaks” chugs with such consistency that by the time it picks up its power to sustain full speed, the film becomes an unstoppable freight train of intrigue and intensity.

In the interest of keeping its secrets somewhat secret, allow me to describe “Freaks” this way. Think of “Brightburn” (review here), but with genuine drama revolving around parental fears and coming of age trauma, not cursory comic book strokes designed as a hollow platform for brutality and bloodshed. “Freaks” shares more in common with “Midnight Special” (review here) as a quasi-grounded take on super-powered people targeted for suppression, albeit rooted in a lightly dystopian country that is as understatedly fascinating as it is undeniably frightening.

Tight acting by the top trio incentivizes investment in the fiction. Practically every person is some amalgamation of selfless commitment to helping others, duplicitous deception, and outright ruthlessness regarding how far they’ll go to see themselves come out on top in a conflict. “Freaks” makes its hay by keeping viewers guessing. Every revelation adds another layer to the story, and the teeter-totter of constantly changing motivations powering each performance maintains that mystique.

Emile Hirsch’s problematic offscreen persona hangs a cloud over the father’s head. Then once a captured imagination accepts his onscreen alter ego as authentic, Hirsch hits enough sweet spots as a doting dad to keep a cute relationship with Chloe. Alternatively, his manic madness equally excels at establishing uncertain danger regarding how much of a good guy he even is.

Ditto Bruce Dern, who puts in a level of work not often seen at this late stage of his long career. Dern’s “Mr. Snowcone” sends out “stranger danger” signals of a sleazy child abductor before effortlessly flipping into a kindly grandfather figure that makes you wonder, “wait a minute.” It’s disconcerting how often the camera set at kid’s-eye-view stares at the white whiskers in his nostrils. Nevertheless, Dern’s weirdo ice cream man might be the MVP in terms of how much he causes us to question what his individual endgame really is.

Newcomer Lexy Kolker couldn’t be more admirably adorable as Chloe. As with everyone else though, she can be just as obnoxious when she moves into brat mode. It’s precisely the dichotomy her character calls for. Credit co-directors Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky for setting everyone to the same dials, and kudos to the cast for recognizing when and how hard to hit their switches.

Subtly lit cinematography stages “Freaks” in a perfect place for a slightly askew near-future with an intangibly otherworldly quality. The film takes place in a reality relative to our own, or a version of it anyway, while retaining a sense of existing in its own separate space. Casually handheld camerawork amplifies that environment. It’s not the herky-jerky “NYPD Blue” style, but the guerrilla “Friday Night Lights” method that makes it seem like the camera is an unnoticed fly-on-wall merely capturing candid moments.

“Freaks” grows more and more engrossing as it rolls forward. This isn’t metahumans emptily flying around, rebounding bullets with steel skin or firing destructive beams from burning eyeballs. Nor is this too “real” of a take dragged down by unnecessary dialogue or trope deconstruction. Lipovsky and Stein’s script cleverly integrates specific superpowers into plotting that leads to unexpectedly satisfying storytelling payoffs. “Freaks” is a film that is dark and occasionally dour. It’s also heroic and hopeful, ultimately ending as a uniquely entertaining, even enlightening take on relationship rifts as examined under an unusual lens.

Review Score: 80

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