Freaks
Chloe is a smart kid. Smart enough to know the combination to dad’s weapon’s safe, smart enough to circumvent his security measures. Smart enough at seven years old to know that there is something wrong with her dad, that despite his best intentions and his obvious love for her that he is controlling and overprotective.
She’s not allowed out, she’s not allowed near the windows, and if she has to talk to anyone who comes to the house she has been drilled on how to respond, the lies she must tell to appear normal, because it’s not just in dad’s head; there is something wrong with the world.
Written and directed by Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky, Freaks was the penultimate film of the FrightFest strand of the Glasgow Film Festival, an often harrowing puzzle whose solution is gradually revealed in what turned out to be one of the biggest crowdpleasers of the weekend.
With aspects of It Comes at Night and A Quiet Place but superior to both, whatever event has befallen the world it is over and done with, a fait accomplit, and Chloe and her father Henry must survive in the aftermath, a twisted approximation of life in the shadows, forever hiding so the bad people won’t come and take Chloe.
Henry tells Chloe that she is a special girl, but to the officers of the ADF she is abnormal, one of the freaks whose bleeding eyes mark her as a threat to be taken somewhere far away for her own safety, for the good of society and the government that protects its citizens.
Principally a film about what a desperate parent will do to protect their child, Freaks is also a film of Trump’s America, of segregation and separating families, of finding the illegal in your midst and turning them in, even if that person is your neighbour, someone you have known for years.
The Autopsy of Jane Doe‘s Emile Hirsch is Henry, hot-headed and at the end of his tether, trying to be a good father and fighting a war on two fronts, hiding Chloe from the authorities and trying to control the impulses of an intelligent and willful child whose curiosity could endanger them both.
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.‘s Lexy Kolker is simply breathtaking as Chloe, branded as a living weapon of mass destruction by ADF officer Ray (Battlestar Galactica‘s Grace Park), convincing in every scene and with the whole film seen through her no-longer-so-innocent eyes, while Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte‘s Bruce Dern is elderly ice cream man Alan who hangs around their neighbourhood behind a veil of bubbles.
Not in the business of offering comfort and sagely homilies so much as the bitter pill of unvarnished truth, veteran actor Dern is wonderful in his first science fiction role since Silent Running, an abrasive yet caring alternative to Henry’s decision to remain underground, peddling dairy goods and activism and no longer willing to play nice for the sake of it.
Escape to Witch Mountain for an adult audience, a twisted superhero tale of equal parts whimsy and dystopian menace, Freaks is violent, explosive and surprisingly funny, the big ideas of a science fiction thriller crafted on an indie budget and, like the rebellious Chloe and her family, all the more creative for having to work within the limitations forced upon it.
Freaks will be released this summer
The 2019 Glasgow Film Festival has now concluded
