Mark Reviews Movies: FREAKS (2019)

Become a fan on Facebook Follow on Twitter

Review by Mark Dujsik | September 12, 2019

With the recent onslaught of superhero movies, we've seen a lot of different heroes and powers and, sometimes, stories. Freaks, a much smaller superhero movie than its mainstream counterparts, might be one of the unintentional casualties of the pervasiveness of that kind of movie.

Ten or maybe even five years ago, writers/directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein's movie probably would have seemed like an ambitious and rather daring take on the genre. In the current movie landscape, though, it just feels like more of the same, only with a lower budget and harder edges.

One of the reasons it does stand out from the crowd is the early air of mystery. At first, the story is about a girl named Chloe (Lexy Kolker) and her overprotective father Henry (Emile Hirsch). Dad keeps his daughter locked away in a decrepit house, constantly warning her that people outside want to kill them. They're the same people, dad says, who killed the girl's mother.

Chloe has become more and more curious, though, and when her father is asleep, the girl wanders outside to an ice cream truck parked in front of the house. Its driver, a mysterious older man (played by Bruce Dern) who knows a lot about Chloe, tells the girl that he knows her mom and also knows where she is now.

The first act of Lipovsky and Stein's screenplay fully embraces the strangeness of its isolated, claustrophobic world. The bigger world beyond the house is built in little details, such as how time seems to slow to a crawl whenever Henry is awake, various news reports about a metropolis in ruins and a debate about what to do with "abnormals" or "freaks," and Chloe's seemingly lucid visions of a neighbor and her mother Mary (Amanda Crew). It's an intriguingly weird puzzle, although the full picture is disappointingly familiar.

Admirably, the filmmakers maintain a somewhat enigmatic aura throughout the following proceeding. Ultimately, though, Freaks simply builds up to a series of confrontations, showdowns, and fights, in which the point seems to be to show off how much Lipovsky and Stein can do with a limited budget (The visual effects are impressive, and some of the action sequences are cleverly staged). As beguiling as the piecemeal world-building may be, it's just a way to disguise how straightforward and routine this tale actually is.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products

Buy the Soundtrack (Digital Download)

Buy the DVD

Buy the Blu-ray