At seven years old you’d expect Chloe to have a fairly narrow view of the world. There are just some horrors a parent would rather a child not be exposed to, lest they find themselves panicky and wracked by existential crises before even adolescence ensues. Even so, it’s only natural that by now Chloe would have questions for her father after so many years spent in a boarded-up house. It’s all she knows, and his reasons are sketchy at best.
Windows are obscured, the door permanently locked. Chloe’s mother is apparently dead. And while Chloe looks like any other kid and wants nothing more than to lead a normal life in which she can wander and eat ice cream without recrimination, she understands that her life is anything but. Her volatile father (Emile Hirsch) insists on preparing her for a world in which she may be killed without warning if she strays, a world in which the man who runs the ice cream truck outside fills his freezers with the bodies of small children. He even coaches her in constructing a second identity: Eleanor Reed, daughter of Nancy Reed who lives across the street, likes baseball. But when Chloe becomes impatient and escapes her father’s close eye only to draw the attention of the sly Mr Snowcone (Bruce Dern), she is exposed to a world living under the threat of so-called ‘abnormals’, also known as freaks.
Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein may not have the budget of a sci-fi blockbuster, but they make up for that by proving themselves astute story-tellers. Through a scene-stealing performance from newcomer Lexy Kolker as Chloe, Freaks is not so much a showcase for supernatural thrills; rather this genre is simply an apt way to explore the dangers of alienation and the pitfalls of overprotective parenting. It comes across more as a social commentary in the vein of District 9 than the more obvious comparisons with X-Men, with a dash of horror in its drip-feed of tension and withheld plot detail. We don’t know much about the abnormals, more commonly known as freaks, except that they have the unfortunate side-effect of bleeding from the eye and that they are capable of… things which you should discover yourself.
Central to Freaks is Kolker’s juggling performance with the various quirks of her emotionally stunted character. Chloe longs to live a normal life despite having no understanding of what ‘normal’ is. In wanting to escape, it’s not so much that she doesn’t love her father, but one can tolerate knowing so little for only so long before it becomes dangerous to your wellbeing. In capturing this, Kolker mingles playfulness with vulnerability, innocence with malevolence — remarkable given her age.
Though, performances aside, perhaps most impressive about Freaks is its world-building around the demonisation of abnormals, in spite of much of the drama unfolding within four walls. Much of this atmosphere is down to Dad’s paranoia and unpredictability, and Hirsch does a very convincing unhinged paranoiac, one who could be capable of anything. But it is also the eerie yellow-tinged light, the stained clothes and the news cycle spouting protests and disasters on repeat that build a certain expectation of the world beyond their front door, one which you might assume to mean burnt-out cars and bearded savages. This makes Chloe’s first venture outdoors all the more fascinating when reality is revealed and the predatory world that Chloe has been warned about soon becomes clearer. A particular scene in which Chloe and her father actually meet Nancy (Michelle Harrison) and her family is a show-stopper, neatly bringing together all of Freaks’ themes and ideas.
If up to that point this film is a triumph, Freaks does lose something in its final act when all mystery has been lifted and what is left is run-of-the-mill urgency to reach a conclusion. At this point a more developed villain might have kept us guessing and allowed the many ideas raised in this film to be wrapped up or explored even more fruitfully. Alas a good villain is perhaps the most marked thing this film is missing, and so an equally important side to this story is largely lost to speculation. But this is not to take anything away from Lipovsky and Stein in their feature debut, nor Kolker—all of whom have very bright futures.
Freaks is in cinemas from 12th September through Icon Film Distribution.
