“Control Freak” is a film so raw, messy, and sincere that it seems to have been torn from the bodies of the people who made it. It is about an influencer named Valerie (Kelly Marie Tran), who is on the verge of mainstream stardom when she develops an itch that won't go away on the back of her head. Her books and seminars mix pop psychology, inspirational slogans, and vague personal confessions. Shal Ngo wrote and directed the film. No matter how hard Valerie scratches, the itch gets worse—and more disgusting.
“Control Freak” has gotten mixed reviews from my colleagues, but I found it hypnotic and think about it often. Due to the way certain scenes weaponize everyday images and situations and make it impossible to experience them without thinking of "Control Freak," there have also been a few times when I kind of wished I hadn't seen it. It’s fair to say that, in my mind at least, it owns the itchy scalp for all time, in the same way that “Jaws” owns the beach and “Psycho” the shower.
Valerie’s attempt to cure the itch turns the film into a journey of self-discovery, one that operates on multiple levels and intertwines several filmmaking modes. “Control Freak” is a psychodrama about families and relationships; an analysis of people of Vietnamese heritage assimilating (or not assimilating) into mainstream U.S. culture; a story of suppressed personal and national traumas manifesting in daily life; and a “Rosemary’s Baby”-esque thriller about a woman who knows something is dangerously wrong with her body but can’t get anyone to take her seriously.
There are also intimations that Valerie’s troubles might be caused by a demon known as Sanshi (from Chinese folklore) that entered the extended family’s life via Valerie’s father Sang (Toan Le), a former South Vietnamese infantryman during the war who lives in the same city as his daughter and has become a Buddhist monk and pacifist and licked his drug problem (or so he says). "Control Freak" makes connections to violent supernatural psychodramas like "The Exorcist," "The Entity," and "The Manitou" through the latter strand. But there’s a key difference: Ngo’s script tactically declines to say for certain whether the demon is a metaphor for various things or a monster that exists outside of the main character’s head. Because they are seen from her perspective, even the instances in which Valerie sees evidence of the monster's existence in photographs could be interpreted as figurative. There’s also a fair amount of discussion of mental illness being generationally transferred within Valerie’s family, the locus of which was Valerie’s late mother, but here, too, the movie doesn’t adopt an either/or approach—i.e, either the demon is a metaphor for mental illness, as in “the demons in my head,” or it’s an actual monster. The mental disorder exists. The demon, complete with Xenomorph nails and skittering tentacles, is a hideous triumph of costuming, puppetry, and CGI. There have been complaints that the film is “repetitive,” but I didn’t see it that way. What I saw was an escalation of Valerie’s erratic behavior and increasing desperation that her condition, whatever it actually is, has surged into the forefront of her life and is systematically destroying everything she’s built, including her marriage to her creative partner Robbie (Miles Robbins), the business and media relationships she’s built up, and the bond with her audience, which projects their own problems onto Valerie (as she invites them to do) and sees her as a catalyst for managing their problems and getting control of their own lives. In this sense, the structure of “Control Freak” is reminiscent of a classic addiction or mental health narrative, in which the protagonist must take the initiative in diagnosing and dealing with what’s ailing them and take steps (with help from others) to reclaim control of their life.
However, there is no denying that this film is far from orderly or neat. “Control Freak” staggers through its increasingly surreal story like a disoriented person trying to get to a bed before they pass out. I don’t think it’s the kind of movie that can be evaluated by the commercial mainstream screenplay workshop language like “the third act needs work” or “it’s too long” or “things are set up but not satisfyingly paid off,” etc. The writer-director appears to have an eerie mind meld with his lead actress, allowing her to become a vehicle for expressing his inchoate obsessions and anxieties (and vice versa) in this clearly personal film. (Tran is brilliant here, giving a performance that’s perfectly modulated no matter how upsetting or bizarre things get; there are a couple of scenes that made me imagine Gena Rowlands in a John Cassavetes domestic drama, though covered in gore and goo.)
In a strange, dark way, “Control Freak” could be characterized as self-help work of a different sort. It offers something more akin to a vessel containing shards of many different kinds of mirrors and a lot of blood and guts than it does thought prompts and action memos. I suspect that the more open viewers are to the idea of just staring into the vessel and allowing their minds to roam, the more they’ll like it.