In the Flesh: Control Freak

Control Freak is not a perfect movie. Far from it. Its symbolic and thematic languages are unwieldy, getting tripped up on themselves as it struggles to make a coherent story out of the lingering horror of the Vietnam War, immigrant mental health struggles, and assimilationist rejection of one’s culture of origin. The color grading is drab, the framing competent but seldom more than that (when director Shal Ngo hits on something really brilliant, a nightmarishly stressful pitched and zoomed-out shot from the back of Val Nguyen’s (Kelly Marie Tran) SUV into the front, he immediately makes sure we know it’s good by doing it again five minutes later), the pacing leaping shakily from domestic issues to infestation horror to a hungry ghost. The need to show the ghost as ultimately symbolic and therefore defeatable makes the final act feel somewhat slapdash, though I could forgive far worse in exchange for the frankly wonderful practical and CGI creature effects used to conjure the Sanshi.

Kelly Marie Tran gives an admirably unlikeable performance as Valerie “Val” Nguyen, a motivational speaker/personal mastery bullshit artist who has begun chugging her own Flavorade. In the wake of her mother’s traumatic drowning and her absentee father Sang’s (Toan Le) struggles with addiction, Val has fled into the great American tradition of repressing your issues and then congratulating yourself so hard on that repression that it becomes your career. She is surrounded by lickspittles and unprincipled mercenaries, like her assistant, Crystal (Callie Johnson), who cynically counters Val’s husband Robbie’s (Miles Robbins) concerns about Val’s clearly crumbling mental health with an accusation that Robbie fears powerful women. It’s a pity the film fails to develop these thoughts much further, though along the way we’re treated to the image of Val poking a finger through her own decaying skull and inflicting brain damage on herself, a scene so gnarly it gave me a stress nightmare.

There are some admirably nasty and upsetting things along the way, from the sinister restraint rig Val home-builds to keep herself from scratching her scalp in her sleep to the Evil Dead-esque hand amputation sequence. Toan Le gives a strong turn as Val’s father, a man struggling with everything he’s got against his past as a soldier and his failures as a father and husband and still coming up short. Miles Robbins brings surprising depth to Robbie, who might otherwise have languished in the realm of “concerned spouse.” But like many other ghost stories, Control Freak (which seems like a working title nobody ever bothered to change, frankly) starts to show signs of strain when it turns toward resolving its ideas. It undermines a lot of what Val goes through if she can defeat her ghost head-on. It is, as Val herself says, insane that Robbie wants to stay with her and raise a family after she drugs him and ties him to their bed. The movie wants that neat little bow, with only the suggestion of a tamed and quieted ongoing thread of suffering to mar it, and it’s poorer for it.