Control Freak is the latest Hulu-exclusive movie spun from the streamer’s horror-short anthology Bite-Size Halloween. Filmmaker Shal Ngo’s 2021 six-minuter Control is now a feature-length outing starring Star Wars alum Kelly Marie Tran, and in many ways it’s a Hell Of A Movie. Tran plays a Brene Brown-ish self-help guru who doesn’t practice what she preaches when she instructs her large fanbase to stop listening to the voices inside their heads telling them all kinds of awful, self-destructive things – but hypocrisy is a touch further down the list than the ancient demon that drives her to compulsively scratch an itch on her scalp until things get really gross. A demon that I think is a metaphor more than an actuality, but who can tell for sure?
The Gist: Our introduction to Val (Tran) finds her on stage, giving a motivational speech to her adoring fans. The metaphor she uses for mental illness is a parasite that infects its host. And succinctly summarized, her overall message is of self-empowerment: The only person that can help yourself is capital-Y You. Easier said than done? Maybe. Control Freak is kinda almost an indictment of self-help influencers, and as is often true in real life, it’s hard to discern whether Val’s blunt, somewhat overconfident sloganeering is truth or hokum. Whatever it is, she either doesn’t believe her own spiel or it’s ineffective in her situation, which finds the anxiety stemming from her mother’s death manifesting via her uncontrollable digging at a spot on her scalp until blood cakes under her fingernails.
So: Scratch scratch scratch. It’s there on the soundtrack. Scratch scratch scratch. Constantly. Scratch scratch scratch. She sees insects everywhere too, crawling on the floor of her sprawling modern manse, to a hole in the wall, which she peers into and sees only darkness and maybe swarms of ants. Strange, her husband Robbie (Miles Robbins) doesn’t mention the bugs. They’ve been married for about a year, and they’re trying to conceive a child, but she has a secret stash of birth control in the drawer beneath the hydrocortisone cream she frequently applies to the itch (scratch scratch scratch) even though it doesn’t help. Scratch scratch scratch, scratch scratch scratch, scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch.
The sensitive among us will start to feel like there’s ants in our own hair, tickling and irritating the skin (scratch scratch scratch). The sound design will get to ya.We get an exterior shot of Val’s gigantohouse, and we hear scratch scratch scratch, and then it cuts to Val using a nail file on her nails, and then a real file, like from Home Depot, the kind you’d hide in a cake so Daddy can escape from prison, on her head. This is a pretty serious movie, but when the comedy hits, it’s GRIM.
Val’s psychological state grows increasingly unstable as the film progresses, revealing bits and pieces of a terrible moment from her childhood. It’s surreal, depicting Val and her mother underwater and struggling, and whether it’s a realistic portrayal of what happened or a memory-warped fragment, its truth fits the ambiguous nature of many things in this movie. Val hasn’t seen her father in years, but a speaking tour of Asia requires her birth certificate, and he knows where it is. Sang (Toan Le) is a recovering drug addict who’s now a Buddhist monk, but his quest for inner peace doesn’t mean his interactions with Val are peaceful. On the wall of his room she spots a tapestry of a bizarre demon, and he explains in so many words that being possessed by it is hereditary – her mother had it, and now she does too, Sang insists. We see a horrific scene from Sang’s stint for the Vietnamese army in the Vietnam war, and the monster’s clawed, black, scaly arm manifests right there. Now Val sees it too – and eventually the entire beast attached to it.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Control Freak conjures George P. Cosmatos Of Unknown Origin if he’d collaborated with David Cronenberg and threw in a creature that’s a hybrid of the Alien Xenomorph and the Predator Yautja. It’s also the best Bite Size Halloween spinoff I’ve seen – far more inspired than Mr. Crocket or Outside, and deeper than the satire Appendage.
Performance Worth Watching: Control Freak feels like Tran’s long-overdue opportunity to showcase her ability to headline a film – her post-Star Wars career didn’t blow up like it should have, mostly due to the ridiculous and abusive backlash the stars of said franchise endured. Here, she digs deep and bravely embraces the inner chaos of this character, and shows her intensity in both emotional moments and terrifying bits of body-horror craziness. (Note, this is among three Tran films in 2025, including a role in The Wedding Banquet, which debuted to good reviews at Sundance and will be released theatrically in April.)
Memorable Dialogue: Val lashes out at Robbie during a marital spat: “Are you Good Will Hunting me right now?”
Sex and Skin: A couple of reasonably steamy and provocative sex scenes; sideboob; top crack.
Our Take: Control Freak’s grand thematic overtures are screamingly obvious: The irony of a self-help “expert” who’s unable to help herself, and the pseudo-anthropomorphization of mental illness as a monster are so on-the-nose, many septums may end up being deviated. But within that thematic framework, this is a sharp, intelligent film, not unlike The Substance in its fearless desire to Go There a few times (although Control Freak is more serious and less gonzo-batshit than Coralie Fargeat’s soon-to-be body horror classic) and illustrate in horrifying fashion how there are no safe places to escape from unprocessed trauma.
Which is to say this film will test you – your ability to peer through your fingers at some highly effective creepy-crawly stuff, clench-your-teeth-and-bear-it depictions of self-mutilation (especially during the intense, violent climax) and your inclination to make sense of everything that happens. Some will criticize Control Freak for not “working” or bringing together its various messy subplots, horror flirtations or even the nature of its central metaphor, namely, if the demon is visible to anyone but Val and those afflicted with it.
Whether the story is grounded in realism or the supernatural is a shallow musing, though; I subscribe to the film’s subtextual assertion that mental illness is not beholden to rationality, and inexplicable loose ends abound in the gray areas of real life. Take Val’s relationship with her father as an example – on one level, you could say his character is ill-formed and inconsistent, but their relationship exists on shifting sands, and the prickly complexity of their interactions implies how difficult it is for Val to define things like relationships, morals and even reality itself. Ngo doesn’t offer any tidy answers or show any eagerness to explain things; in one key scene he jumps out of Val’s point-of-view for an objective look at what’s happening, then kind of backtracks on it later, leaving us provoked and baffled. We wouldn’t criticize David Lynch for doing that, because he and Ngo seemingly want to force us to question the nature of perception and reality.
Control Freak is impressive from a technical standpoint, Ngo using sound and well-considered imagery (the film is significantly more artfully photographed than most squashed-flat streaming fare) to create tactile sensation – the constant scratch scratch scratch may drive you crazy in a way that enhances the viewing experience, challenges your comfort levels and sets you up for some serious squirming during the third act. The core monster FX are practical and legitimately freaky, with nods to Alien and The Babadook, both comparisons one shouldn’t make lightly. Ngo colors the film with depictions of Val’s Vietnamese heritage and a simplistic, but sturdy portrayal of a marriage disrupted by mental illness. But his main goal seems to be to inspire a lot of questions that have no easy answers. It’s OK for a movie to not pull everything together into a tidy thematic package, which never seemed to be the intent of Control Freak.
Our Call: Control Freak gets under your skin – a testament to its effectiveness as psychological horror. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
