Chloe (Lexy Kolker) isn’t allowed to play outside. Her front door is barricaded and sealed; every window is covered and she is under strict instructions not to ever, ever attempt to go outside. The world is a terrifying place, her paranoid father (Emile Hirsch) keeps on telling her. But Chloe has no sense of this danger on a personal level; she’s very young, and any risk her father has incurred for her sake seems lost on her. He might be planning for someone else to maybe take care of her in the future, but Chloe just wants to be a regular kid.
However, it’s soon made apparent that this is absolutely not going to happen. What at first seems as though it’s going to be yet another zombie-style horror, where Something or Someone Bad is trying to get inside and the inhabitants of a house have to literally put up a blockade to stop this happening, is soon something else entirely. When Chloe peers out of a corner of a window, she sees birds flying – but there’s something odd about their flight; they seem to be moving out of time with everything else. Her dad is acting increasingly coyly, ramping up his warnings about the outside world, while failing to answer his daughter’s questions about whatever became of her mother. The house seems to have odd manifestations in it, too, which seem somewhere between hallucination and memory, from what it seems. And, far from there being hordes of undead or otherwise diseased/obviously dangerous people roaming around, the first other person that she sees is…a guy with an ice-cream truck (Bruce Dern), who seems to be trying to get her attention. He even posts her a neat pop-up book; is he really so bad? By this point in the film, I’d gone from having one set of expectations (oh, not another zombie flick) to another (oh, not another parental paranoia trip) but, gladly, whenever I thought I knew what I was watching, the film had to nous and ambition to change its narrative.
If you can say one thing with certainty about Freaks – wherever its plot ends up going, and it goes a long way – it’s that this is a superb family drama at heart, with believable relationships, superb performances and bags of confidence, sustaining humour against pathos. Many of these kinds of stories sink or swim on the child performances, and I’m glad to say that Lexy Kolker does an impressive job here, reminding me in some respects of Angourie Rice as Rose in Australian end-of-days drama These Final Hours (2013), with similar work to do enacting innocence and a desire for family life against everything going to hell, whilst the grown-ups do their best to make sense of it all. In many respects, because Chloe is struggling to understand what’s going on in her world, the audience is kept at the same level for a large part of the film. As she starts to understand, so do we, and I don’t feel that there was really a point in the film when I ever leapt too far ahead of her. This works really well, keeping the plot unfolding in gradual stages.
It’s also a pleasure to see Bruce Dern getting stuck into a genre film role here, working very well with all the cast, but particularly with Kolker (he said that she reminded him of his daughter Laura at that age) whilst getting a large number of the best lines. Oh, did I mention that Freaks allows itself a few jokes along the way, as well as revealing a family in unique and genre-bending jeopardy? Directors/writers Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein clearly had a lot to do here, but it all works together seamlessly well. The sci-fi content here is engaging and important, but it’s how it affects the family which really matters, making for something warm, intricate and very clever, with space enough to lighten the mood in places too. However, and again thanks to a performance by a talented child actress, it all concludes with questions hanging in the air, a touch of ambiguity to take away.
I’m working hard here not to spoiler Freaks, as it’s one of those films you need to see unfold in its own way, but rest assured there is more than enough here to justify your attention. This is what genre film is all about, and it’s why, after initially eyerolling at the thought of watching yet another derivative piece of work, it’s so refreshing and rewarding to find a film like this one. Even where you can recognise some of the film’s elements, it does something new with them and makes them matter.
Freaks (2018) screened at Frightfest Glasgow on Saturday 2nd March 2019.