Freaks movie storyline. Shot through with paranoia and claustrophobia, Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein’s genre-bending Freaks focuses on seven-year-old Chloe (Lexy Kolker) and her constantly distraught father (Emile Hirsch). Isolated and desperate to get outside and experience life beyond the crumbling walls of their dilapidated house, Chloe finally makes a break for it when her sleep-deprived father drifts off.
But the outside world isn’t all she envisioned. The fierce light is disorienting, almost nauseating, and the neighbours, whom Chloe has been hearing about for years, are creepily bland. She’s immediately met by a twitchy, oddly familiar ice-cream salesman (Bruce Dern) who gives off the wrong kind of vibes but entices Chloe onto his truck. He speeds off to the park and en route she’s introduced to a strange world, haunted by the threat of freaks who look like us but are markedly different — and likely dangerous.
An oblique allegory about refugees, diversity, and fear of difference, Freaks juggles ambiguity and mystery virtually to its last scenes. Presenting events through the eyes of a young girl who is terrified, incapable of understanding all that’s going on around her, prone to fantasy, and uncertain about who she can trust, Stein and Lipovsky create an unsettling world.
Like those chilling early Philip K. Dick novels or Bendis and Coipel’s House of M, where reality is constantly threatening to collapse, Freaks grounds its more fantastic elements in a carefully created and fully conceived environment, boasting enough psychological acuity to entertain the most demanding viewer, and enough shocks and surprises to keep everyone guessing.
Freaks is a 2018 science fiction thriller film written and directed by Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein, and starring Emile Hirsch, Bruce Dern, Grace Park, Amanda Crew and Lexy Kolker. The film follows a seven-year-old girl (Kolker) who leaves her home for the first time after being kept inside by her father (Hirsch). The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 8, 2018, and was released commercially in North America on September 13, 2019, by Well Go USA Entertainment. It received positive reviews, with praise for Kolker’s performance.
Film Review for Freaks
When we talk about superhero movie overload, it shouldn’t be a question of whether there’s simply too many movies about super-powered individuals. Instead, it’s more about whether a specific movie is adding something worthwhile—and special—to an abundance of tales about people who thrill us by enacting the physically impossible, like controlling minds, turning themselves invisible, or blasting into the sky. “Freaks,” written and directed by Adam B. Stein and Zach Lipovsky, is a half-nifty, half-cheesy addition to that roster, and I can imagine it being fairly divisive between sci-fi and superhero fans.
“Freaks” starts small, by focusing on the relationship between a father (Emile Hirsch, his character known as Dad) and his daughter, Chloe (Lexy Kolker). In the first scene, he’s preparing her for a type of survival, telling her how to lie to adults, and getting her to memorize a speech in case she’s ever caught. They live in a house that’s been boarded up, as if the apocalypse has already happened, or could any minute. But while Chloe lives in isolation, she’s enchanted by the images of suburban sunlight that she sees through the cracks, and by the ice cream truck outside run by a man named Mr. Snowcone (Bruce Dern). Through the film’s first act, we find out that the world has not ended, but that her father knows something about Chloe she doesn’t understand—Chloe has super powers, and they can reach well beyond the house she’s contained in.
On a larger scale, “Freaks” takes place in a world not too removed from the X-Men, where the super-powered (known even in government-speak as “freaks”) are in danger, especially after a tragedy related to super powers wiped out a city. The freaks are being pursued by Agent Ray (Grace Park), and there’s talk of how people considered “abnormal” were brought to an ominous mountain. As Chloe watches on TV during one of the film’s moments of dumping context, she hears talk about illegal people “running loose,” and it feels too much like shoehorned context about our current immigration crisis.
The story is all told from Chloe’s perspective, who is performed with great confidence by Lexy Kolker. She’s in practically every scene, the mysteries of the film placed on her shoulders as Chloe tries to decipher what the adults are ultimately intending to do with her; she has strong scenes with her anxious father, and also with Dern’s Mr. Snowcone, who swoops into Chloe’s life in an unexpected way by luring her outside. He proves to be a very Bruce Dern-type of grouchy pseudo-father figure, and he knows Chloe’s true potential, and how Chloe can help him break into that mountain.
But working through the movie from Chloe’s eyes can be confusing, especially as it wants to be so intricate. “Freaks” jostles you around too much with sequences that may or may not be real—like when she talks to a girl her age named Harper (Ava Telek), who accuses reclusive Chloe of breaking into her sleepover—and the film doesn’t come off as intricate, so much as unfocused. The same goes for a scene where Chloe might be talking to her mother, who suddenly appears in a closet, or it might just be a ghost of her. It all makes sense later, but it’s not a mystery you hold onto for fun, so much as get dragged along by. The slippery aspects of the script clash with the sentimentality of the movie, and it’s messier than it needs to be to make an impact.
“Freaks” is ultimately the the story of Chloe learning the truth about her surroundings, and her powers, with the help of her father and Mr. Snowcone. The third act of this film provides a different way around this climax—instead of having characters “break in” and get out—and displays some impressive slow-motion as one character (Chloe isn’t the only “freak” in this story) manipulates time. It’s clever, too, how certain powers overlap within later action scenes, all within the indie’s production value.
But when Lipovsky & Stein finally have all of their emotions and super powers on the table, it doesn’t add up to much, and the results are far too predictable. Yes, it’s an R-rated movie with some abrupt blood splatter—caused by the super-powers—but it has the simplicity of a more cynical version of what’s deemed a kid’s story, a choice that feels like a cop-out even though it’s all from Chloe’s POV. The powers that make “Freaks” super in turn feel more like plot devices, inspired more by cultural appetite than an inspired take on what it means to defy physics, and to use it in a life-or-death situation. That’s the greatest weakness of “Freaks”—it’s just not special enough.
Freaks (2019)
Directed by: Adam Stein, Zach Lipovsk
Starring: Emile Hirsch, Bruce Dern, Grace Park, Amanda Crew, Lexy Kolker, Ava Telek, Michelle Harrison, Matty Finochio, Aleks Paunovic, Reese Alexander, Dakota Daulby, Dean Redman
Screenplay by: Zach Lipovsky, Adam Stein
Production Design by: Moe Curtin
Cinematography by: Stirling Bancroft
Film Editing by: Sabrina Pitre
Costume Design by: Mia Fiddis
Set Decoration by: Alysson Hall, Hoo Youn Kwon
Art Direction by: Bri Proke
Music by: Tim Wynn
MPAA Rating: R for violence and some language.
Distributed by: Well Go USA Entertainment
Release Date: September 8, 2018 (TIFF), September 13, 2019 (United States)
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