Direction: Zach Lipovsky / Adam Stein
Country: USA
Directed by the team Zach Lipovsky-Adam Stein, Freaks is a sci-fi horror thriller that trusts the fantastic and the otherworldly to succeed. Yet, being original and narratively consistent while straddling genres is not easy nowadays and this film is not going to change that. After an interesting setup, the story takes its multi-dimensional fantasy beyond the acceptable, frittering away some possibly good ideas as it keeps degrading in front of our eyes.
The plot centers on the special 7-year-old Chloe (Lexy Kolker), who is kept indoors by her paranoid, super-protective father (Emile Hirsch). He sometimes loses his temper when the crescent curiosity of the child makes her disobey and expose them to a violent exterior world.
Facing isolation and trained to stay calm under pressure, Chloe gets obsessed with the idea that she has no mother. She was told that her late mother, Mary (Amanda Crew), which whom she secretly communicates through a door in her closet, died because she broke the rules, but those rules are never disclosed. A mix of fear and fascination get hold of her when the suspicious Mr. Snowcone (Bruce Dern) convinces her to get in the ice cream truck with him to escape the home confinement imposed by her father.
More interested in surface flash than character depth, Freaks is a powerless surreal lunacy overstuffed with trivialities. It's a freak of a movie that grows busier than mysterious, and for this reason, will unlikely create a positive impact.
