It
should be reassuring to know the ice creams trucks are still working in the
dystopian future. Then again, when was an ice cream man good news in genre
cinema? Rather inconveniently, ice cream represents the freedom of outside life
to a seven-year-old girl rebelling against the rigid control of her
over-protective father. It also tastes delicious. Unfortunately, he has good
reason to be concerned for her safety in Zach Lipovsky & Adam B. Stein’s Freaks,
which opens this Friday in New York.
This
Freaks is very different from Tod Browning’s Freaks. For one
thing, they look just like everyone else—but they’re not. At first, it is not
exactly clear what is going on in this not-so-very-near-future world. Chloe’s
dad acts like the world outside is an apocalyptic wasteland and the news
reports of massive terrorist attacks seem to support that impression. However,
when Chloe disobediently ventures outside her boarded-up house, her
neighborhood looks very much like our here-and-now.
We
also soon discover Chloe has some pretty serious powers. Her father insists she
is a perfectly normal little girl, but the weird, looks-like-he-should-be-on-a-special-offenders-registry
Mr. Snowcone (whose ice cream truck always appears at opportune moments)
encourages her to develop her gifts. Sadly, the more her father tries to
contain her, the more she resents it, becoming dangerously emotional.
To
their credit, Lipovsky & Stein pull off some masterful misdirection in the
first act that really keeps us guessing, but the film’s underlying conflict is
really nothing new. Frankly, after decades of X-Men comic books and movies,
it would be far more interesting to visit a genre world where the super-powered
“others” secretly living among us really represent a deliberate and malicious threat
to society that must be rooted out. That would also better reflect the perils
we face in this day and age, considering the number of foreign agents believed
to be operating on our soil as sleeper cells (at least that is what the opening
of the sadly canceled The Enemy Within told us).
Young
Lexy Kolker is a bit like Drew Barrymore in Firestarter, but scarier and
more erratic. Regardless, Emile Hirsch provides the film’s true emotional
center as the father who is absolutely desperate to save his daughter. On the
other hand, Bruce Dern is way too creepy and sleazy looking for the character
of Mr. Snowcone. Seriously, if you saw him loitering around a playground, you
would call the cops. Speaking of the law, Grace Park provides a steady and
authoritative presence as the moderate sounding Agent Ray, helping to further
muddy viewers’ assumptions.
Lipovsky
& Stein crank up the tension and the suspense quite adroitly. They succeed
in pulling us in and keeping us on pins-and-needles, even though it is rather
disappointing how familiar the story turns out to be. Of course, if originality
were easy, everyone would do it. Recommended for the tight, tense execution
rather than the stale dystopian elements, Freaks opens this Friday
(9/13) in Brooklyn, at the Regal Sheepshead Bay.
