Control Freak, 2025.
Written and Directed by Shal Ngo.
Starring Kelly Marie Tran, Miles Robbins, Toan Le, Kieu Chinh, Callie Johnson, Zack Gold, Scott Takeda, Chelsea Parsons, Samantha Coppola, Nova Mai Murillo, and Stanley White Jr.
SYNOPSIS:
A motivational speaker, plagued by an uncontrollable itch on her head, becomes infected with a parasitic demon from her homeland.
Kelly Marie Tran’s Val turned a rather traumatic life around by seizing control and doing whatever she set her mind to. Now, she is a celebrity motivational speaker/life coach, passing on the tips and keys to her success. She also can’t refrain from rigorously scratching away at an itch on the top of her scalp, which we are quickly clued into as the cause of a parasitic Sinosphere demon attached to her. As this scratching becomes rampant and harmful, resulting in a bloody injury concerning enough to cover up entirely, the question then becomes who in writer/director Shal Ngo’s Control Freak is psychologically in charge of Val.
It’s a solid premise with fascinating untapped mythology to explore, but Shal Ngo doesn’t know how to capitalize on that psychological horror component. Not only are there the usual eye-rolling hallucinatory dream sequences (sometimes dreams within dreams to annoy the viewer more), Val’s personal life is brought into play through estranged family members and a love interest, each with their own complicated dramatic problems, meaning that these surrounding subplots start overshadowing the supernatural element while also serving as a means of distraction. Similar to those lazy, ineffective dream sequences, it’s more about prompting the viewer to question what’s real and what isn’t, unintentionally neutering the uniqueness of the narrative.
Val’s mother died in an ambiguous underwater incident that her father Sang (Toan Le) witnessed. She placed the blame on him, especially as he turned to drug addiction. Presently, he is a monk, an occupation his daughter questions whether he is suitable for with good reason. Nevertheless, a hunt for a birth certificate required to take her motivational speech tour to China pushes her back into his life, watch also gets her re-investigating the death of her mother and whatever repressed trauma is lingering. Meanwhile, Val and her significant other, Robbie (Miles Robbins), are trying to have a child. However, her craving for control over various aspects of their lives gradually gets in the way more as the head-scratching intensifies.
It’s unfortunate that Control Freak almost instantaneously veers off into clichéd directions since the visual and sound design accentuates Val’s itching into a genuinely unsettling physical addiction. It is vicariously painful to look at and listen to. Once she has burrowed a literal hole into her head, that feeling amplifies. Credit also goes to the depiction of the demon, resembling a taller, more anthropomorphic take on a Xenomorph with long, slender, claw-like fingers.
Bluntly put, roughly 80 minutes of the movie engages with the wrong type of psychological mind games. Some of this is course-corrected during the finale, which takes clips and soundbites of Val’s motivational speaking and turns it upside down, finally playing into the concept of control and whether she has ever fully had that or has been merely keeping something dangerous at bay.
Control Freak is a bit too messy and tropey, ironically showing that Shal Ngo doesn’t have precise or complete control over what approach to take with this admittedly chilling concept. That doesn’t stop Kelly Marie Tran from going for it, though, giving an impressively committed full-body physical performance; she makes for a hypnotic watch, especially when coming undone psychologically, yet still psyching herself for whatever extreme lengths necessary to exercise this demon.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association, Critics Choice Association, and Online Film Critics Society. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews and follow my BlueSky or Letterboxd
