Year of Release: 2018
Director: Zach Lipovsky, Adam B. Stein
Starring: Emile Hirsch, Bruce Dern, Lexy Kolker, Grace Park, Amanda Crew, Ava Telek, Michelle Harrison, Matty Finochio, Aleks Paunovic
Genre: Drama, Sci-Fi
Score out of ten (whole numbers only): 6
Watch it on Amazon
Synopsis and Review
The writing/directing team of Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein have made a career for themselves tackling a variety of genre material, including the fairly recent project of bringing "Kim Possible" to life in a TV movie. "Freaks" had its debut at the Toronto Film Festival of 2018, followed by a series of other film festivals, before premiering in the Fall of 2019. The narrative focuses on seven year old Chloe who has spent all her life in a somewhat decrepit house with her father Henry. Henry trains Chloe on how to deal with situations from the outside, including questions from strangers, but also keeps warning her of the dangers that lie outside their doors, with people who want to kill them both. Chloe in the meantime longs to go outside and misses her mom. She eventually learns of people on the outside who have superhuman abilities, who are named "abnormals", and also learns they're hunted by the government and sent to a containment facility under Madoc Mountain. Even though her father warns her not to go outside, while he's out Chloe ventures and explores, since she's wanting to get some ice cream from an ice cream truck that comes around. Turns out the ice cream truck driver, whose name is Alan, is in reality her grandfather, and her mother is still alive (something even her father does not know), but being held against her will at Madoc Mountain. Both Henry and Alan are revealed to be abnormals, as is the case for Chloe, who has the ability to control people's minds. As Henry discovers more about Chloe's adventures and the situation surrounding Mary, his partner and Chloe's mother (that he believed to be dead), they set out a plan to save her, however government agents are quickly catching up.
"Freaks" which bears the same title as Tod Browning's 1932 classic, has a tone that reminds Jeff Nichols' "Midnight Special", in the sense that it opts to minimize the whole aspect of the supernatural traits the lead characters possess. The writer/directors opt to progressively disclose what is prompting for this nuclear family to hide from the outside world, initially positioning the father character as someone whom we don't really know if he is telling the entire truth or not about how truly life threatening their situation is. As the narrative evolves, the more we understand about the context in which these characters live, though the characters themselves sadly remain very briefly illustrated, including some backdrop on how their supernatural abilities came about. Character details aside, the film manages to illustrate the fear/terror in which Henry, the father figure, lives that himself and his daughter are chased, persecuted and killed, solely for the fact that they are who they are (there's also many parallels to WWII and the extermination of minorities during that War). While the film also has traces of Stephen King's "Firestarter", it definitely goes in a different direction, as it becomes a quest to bring a family unit together. The leading cast is solid, featuring good performances from Emile Hirsch and Bruce Dern, with Lexy Kolker also creating a solid central performance as Chloe. The production team also performs solidly, including Stirling Bancroft's cinematography, and Moe Curtin's production design (even as one can clearly tell the modest budget that was involved in the creation of this feature). It's an inventive take on the super hero genre that is worth watching.
0 comments:
Post a Comment