A motivational speaker who’s built a career on teaching people how to overcome negativity, particularly when it comes in the form of persistent self-doubt, becomes haunted by the voices in her own head in Control Freak. Shal Ngo’s new horror feature for Hulu starts off strong only to fragment a bit in its third act—but Kelly Marie Tran, who stars as the tormented Valerie, never wavers in her performance.
Tran, who came to prominence in Star Wars movies The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker, has her own personal experience with negative voices—specifically, relentlessly toxic Star Wars fans. Whether or not she drew on that experience to play Valerie, we can’t say, but there are other parallels between actor and character: like Tran, Valerie is the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants who moved to America after the war. Fortunately, only the fictional woman is plagued by supernatural trauma that manifests in terrifying visions and excruciating acts of body horror, in particular a nagging itch that sprouts at the back of Valerie’s skull.
At first, she chalks it up to stress—she’s got a big speaking tour coming up, and her husband (Miles Robbins) won’t stop pushing her about starting a family. It’s also about to be the anniversary of her mother’s death. But as the itch becomes more aggressive, the rigidly self-reliant perfectionist continues to unravel, and all the googling in the world can’t help her come up with a solution.
Before long, however, she’s googling another topic: demons. As her symptoms expand to include freaky hallucinations, she becomes desperate enough to consider something supernatural may be afoot. She also starts to think it may be tied to the mother she barely remembers. The family she has left provides little help: there’s her flinty aunt (Kieu Chinh), who’d really rather not revisit the past; and her estranged father (Toan Le), who now lives in a monastery but is still secretly nursing his longtime drug addiction. Her relationship with the latter is particularly fraught, but he’s also the only person with insight into what may be causing her harm.
When Control Freak is following Valerie’s quest to puzzle together her past—and hopefully cure her godawful itch before a) her speaking tour, or b) she does permanent damage while trying to relieve her agony—there’s an urgency to the story that makes you eager to see what she finds out. We haven’t been given any reason to root against Valerie, who can be stubborn and snippy when she’s stressed, but is also an admirably self-made success; in her own speeches, she describes owing the trajectory that took her from sleeping in her car to owning a fancy mansion to nobody but herself, and her self-gathered strength in overcoming the adversities that life has tossed in her path.
So to see her struggle against this latest and greatest horror becomes more unpleasant the longer Control Freak goes on. And, unfortunately, that’s a little too long; at around an hour and 45 minutes, the movie starts to drag the more Valerie continues circling the “no escape” drain. Control Freak began life as a short film, and it feels like writer-director Shal Ngo struggled a bit with expanding the story. Valerie has multiple confrontations with her father that would have perhaps had more impact in a single climactic scene, especially when he reveals he has more terrible truths to share than he’s ever let on.
On the other hand, there are also story threads that go unexplored. Valerie’s aunt appears a few times and despite her unfriendliness, there’s a flicker that she might end up helping her niece, especially since Dad turns out to be so problematic. That never happens. And if Valerie is such a celebrity—being recognized by selfie-demanding fans while out running errands—wouldn’t she have a more well-rounded existence as an influencer? She has one pushy assistant type on speed-dial, and we do see her shooting promo videos and headshots. But in 2025, you’d have to assume someone in Valerie’s line of work would also be constantly updating her public with social media posts—an angle that Control Freak doesn’t dig into at all, but would have been an effective way to further illustrate how much her carefully constructed life is falling apart.
However, the one benefit of having Control Freak be so centered on Valerie is it becomes an absolute showcase for Tran’s talents. Even if the movie itself comes up a bit short—its biggest weak point is that it revolves around a too-obvious central metaphor—there’s no denying its star is a powerhouse.
Tran crafts a character forced to face down some hideous generational trauma as well as a physically exhausting monster, all while grappling with a marriage that’s crumbling as quickly as she fears her sanity might be. Valerie makes some extreme choices, but in Tran’s hands, she remains sympathetic, even if you don’t at all agree with what she’s done. Also, and this is no small thing: she looks great in a hat—which comes in handy when Val has to start improvising to cover her compulsively itchy-scratchy handiwork.
Control Freak hits Hulu March 13.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
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