CONTROL FREAK - Mark Reviews Movies

Control Freak, Hulu

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 12, 2025

Control Freak is yet another of those horror tales in which the monster is either a metaphor or real, depending on what the movie needs it to be at any given moment. Here, the monster is presumably depression or, more broadly, mental health issues, but it's also a very real supernatural creature—a ghost that feeds on a host's dark thoughts like some kind of parasite.

Writer/director Shal Ngo is at least consistent within the material's inconsistency, if that makes any kind of sense. The movie is a horror show from start to finish, gradually escalating the tension and the downfall of its main character. It doesn't try to be or aspire to anything beyond the creepy, unsettling feeling that something is terribly wrong for and/or with—and will only get worse for—its protagonist, so if one can overlook how uncertain the filmmaker is with the central monster-as-metaphor, the movie has that going for it.

Our central character is Val (Kelly Marie Tran), a highly successful motivational speaker who has made a lot of money selling books, giving speeches, and going on tours to help people better themselves. The irony, of course, is that Val's own life and mind are a bit of a mess at the moment, possibly because her husband Robbie (Miles Robbins) really wants to have a kid with her and mainly on account of how much old trauma this potential change of life brings up inside Val.

The big thing is the death of Val's mother when our protagonist was only a child. What we know of the mother's death is that she drowned, and bad visions or nightmares have Val imagining or remembering her mother underwater. Ngo is intentionally hazy in these flashbacks/hallucinations, because to outright state what happened to the mother might be to put everything that unfolds into too clear a context for the other stuff that happens.

Basically, Val has an itch that she can't scratch to satisfaction. That, at least, isn't a metaphor, because she keeps rubbing and scraping her scalp with her fingernails while awake and while asleep. No over-the-counter ointment is working to relieve the physical irritation, and after looking up some information online, she suspects but won't admit that the problem might be psychological—a cycle of stress from work and the thought of starting a family and feeling the need to make everything about her life and herself perfect, lest the negative voice in Val's head convince her that nothing she is or does in life is good enough.

The screenplay puts us right into this way of thinking from the start, and it's initially effective as a result. Tran's performance, which keeps Val's mounting frustration and desperation grounded, is a key component of that, but Ngo's storytelling at first is clear, as well. The pressures for Val keep building, as another tour is upcoming, her house shows signs of an ant infestation, she hides the fact that she's still on birth control from Robbie, and her maternal aunt (played by Kieu Chinh) tells Val that some of her family possessions have been taken by her estranged father Sang (Toan Le). Meanwhile, that damned itch simply won't subside, no matter how long and hard she scratches at it.

Then, the supernatural angle starts to emerge. That comes from Sang, who has become a Buddhist monk and insists that he is clean after years of a drug addiction. All of this raises another possibility of what may have happened to Val's mother, but before we can even consider that the character's trauma might be deeper and point toward something more sinister about her family, Val begins seeing or envisioning a dark, clawed hand reaching for her, grabbing her, and maybe encouraging her to scratch that itch with even more force.

It's at this point that the narrative becomes a jumble of thematic and narrative intent, simply because we're supposed to see this unnatural thing both as a real demonic presence affecting Val and a metaphor for, well, an assortment of ideas. The father explains what he believes it to be and its origin from his time during the war in his homeland of Vietnam. With Sang convinced he spread the ghostly curse to his wife, the spiritual entity is now overloaded with so much thematic weight within the script—having to do with guilt, depression, generational trauma, and a bit more—that it's difficult to determine what Ngo is attempting to do with it in this story.

That's not even taking into account that the ghost is an actual ghost in the story, too, haunting Val and physically pushing her toward even more self-harm. Control Freak wants to have it both ways with its major threat. The movie somewhat works when it's set on one mode, either as a disturbing psychological study of a person under strain or as a progressively gruesome piece of straightforward horror (That wound becomes especially gnarly, not to mention deep, and there's a bit with an electric saw that's quite upsetting). By forcing them together, the result is inexact in what the movie wants to say and how it tries to say it.

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