‘Control Freak’ Review – Kelly Marie Tran Gamely Leads A Head-Scratching Supernatural Horror

You know how someone scratching around you makes you itch? Imagine a whole movie of that and you’ve basically got Control Freak, Hulu’s straight-to-streaming supernatural horror in which Kelly Marie Tran bores a hole in her head because there may or may not be a demon inside it.

Tran’s playing a motivational speaker named Valerie Nguyen in this, an ironic detail that is about as clever as the whole thing gets. Yes, the woman who has made a lucrative career telling people how to form powerful, productive habits has a particularly bad one of her own – she compulsively scratches the back of her head like a demented chimp. Her smugly delivered advice about how to ignore the voice in your head and curb your worst impulses rings rather hollow when she’s so bad at doing it herself.

This is the point, obviously, but I’m not sure it’s one worth making. There’s something inherently distasteful about motivational speakers at the best of times, and I mistrust anyone who thinks their future success is dependent on how many empty aphorisms they can internalize. But whatever. There’s a giant ant in Valerie’s head, and that’s what you’re here for, which is why it’s on the poster.

Val’s scratching habit is worsened by a pending international tour, the Asian leg of which requires her to find her birth certificate, which has been inexplicably hidden by her elusive monk father, Sang (Toan Le). The stress quickly begins to compound, affecting not only Val’s career but also her home life with her much younger-looking husband, Robbie (Miles Robbins). It should come as no surprise that the “control freak” of the title is Valerie herself, who becomes increasingly irate the less she’s able to unpack her complicated family history and solve the worsening problem of her unsanitary compulsions.

The compulsions are intimately tied to that family history, as well as Vietnamese folklore, but they’re mostly in service of the usual supernatural horror tropes. The smartest decision the film makes is being consistent with Val’s character. Her plight doesn’t render her powerless; on the contrary, she attempts to exert control over something fundamentally uncontrollable, leading to increasingly horrifying body horror and an impressively demented final act that better resembles a creature feature than anything else.

Kelly Marie Tran in Control Freak | Image via Hulu

But the admittedly interesting premise can’t sustain a bloated runtime, leading to lackluster pacing. The early discomfort comes from an overreliance on the irritating scratchy sound of nails on scalp and the occasional burrowing of an insect through an orifice it shouldn’t be entering, and until Val’s arc reaches its zenith and she goes properly postal, the whole thing feels trudging and reiterative.

Things do improve the wackier they get, or at least they did for me, but I wasn’t buying the underlying faux cleverness of the premise, which is predictably a metaphor for something else. Val lacks the introspection necessary to identify the root cause of her problem and instead tries to apply blunt force to its symptoms, especially those visible to others. She’s in denial. As long as she looks and sounds the part, she can continue to turn a profit. It’s a commentary on self-help culture, you see!

Of course you see, which is kind of the problem. To be fair to Control Freak, this does eventually evolve into more personal wrestling with grief and family history, which works better because it’s less smug. But a lot of supernatural horror is about these things. The use of Vietnamese folklore and Buddhism for some of the imagery and demonic happenings is fresh on a micro level, but macro-wise it’s familiar enough that most of the enjoyment becomes about how far Val is willing to go. It’s facile.

Despite this, though, Kelly Marie Tran commits so gamely to the material that you do eventually find yourself buying into her plight, despite how thinly written her character and her surrounding personal circumstances are. I never bought into her marriage, for instance, but that’s more down to the writing than the performances. Even in the demented third act when the temptation must have been to go gonzo, Tran keeps things determinedly centered, adding a steely, clear-eyed determination to those moments you’re tempted to look away from. It’s a good turn in a film undeserving of the effort.