‘They look just like us…’
Going right back to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, people have been scared of being the odd one out. While it is normally an alien occupation that leads to a feeling of uncanny otherness (see The Faculty for details), there can be other ways that someone might negatively stand out. Having the ability to take over somebody’s mind for example…
Chloe (Lexy Kolker) is dealing with all the struggles that a young girl must go through. An overprotective father (Emile Hirsch), an absent mother (Amanda Crew) and a grandfather who drives round in an ice cream van trying to poison people… oh and she is a ‘freak’. She has… abilities. That’s about as much as I can give away without edging into spoiler territory.
It’s nice to see Hirsch, an actor who seemingly fell off the face of the earth the second that the credits rolled on Into the Wild, back on screen, and sharing a suitably cranky chemistry with Bruce Dern – one of cinema’s great misanthropes. Kolker also does a great job in what must have been a challenging role for a girl so young. The effects are simple but effective and the plot is unique enough to ensure that I would definitely watch a sequel if directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein felt so inclined as to make one.
Freaks does have a tendency to fall between two stools as it is neither horror nor sci-fi, but rather an uncomfortable hybrid of both, in its best moments however, Freaks stands as an interesting curio with a fascinating concept at its core.