Control Freak, on Hulu

If a self-help program works, you should only need to buy one book once. If it shows you how to unlock your inner potential, why keep buying a bunch of tapes and workshop tickets? Val Nguyen (which usually sounds like “Win”) is about to learn how little her empowerment babble is worth. Her family demon does not care if she awakened her giant within. As a result, today might not be the first day of the rest of her life. Instead, it might be her last, in director-screenwriter Shal Ngo’s Control Freak, which premieres today on Hulu.

Nguyen is a self-help, motivational speaker-human branding campaign on the verge of superstardom. Her upcoming tour should push her into the promised land, but she has been distracted during the final planning by a nasty itch on the back of her head. Her compulsive scratching even draws blood.

Something is very wrong, which Ngo leads viewers to suspect might in some way involve her long buried family trauma. Her mother died under mysterious circumstances, which Nguyen partially blames on her former junkie father, Sang. Perhaps he does too, since he took vows as a Buddhist monk shortly after her death. Nguyen also discovers a lot of darkly mystical documents when she rummages around his storage locker in search of her birth certificate.

Initially, Ngo mines a vein of body horror, but after the first act, he pivots to the supernatural, but with deep psychological and folk horror overtones. The audience never really thinks it all might be in her head, unless you mean the hole he is boring into it. The film also dramatically displays a deep generational divide between Nguyen’s junky “you’re good enough, you’re strong enough” pablum and her Aunt Thuy’s old school, jaded “karma will get you every time” combination of realism and superstition.

Regardless, Ngo is surprisingly successful balancing competing sources of horror. The body horror will literally give you the itch, while the bogeyman is appropriately sinister. However, it is hard to top Nguyen’s spectacular descent into madness, which, thanks to Kelly Marie Tran’s lead performance, is an absolutely spectacular cratering.

Ngo also has a good ear for self-help double-talk signifying nothing—and Tran amazingly manages to say it all with a straight face. Kieu Chinh portrays Aunt Thuy with such astringent vinegar, her withering looks could knock large insects and small birds out of the air. Plus, Toan Le manages to be both deeply sad and uncomfortably erratic as Brother Father Sang.

The rest of the people around Nguyen, including her clueless husband Robbie are bland yes-men types, but those ae the sorts control freaks prefer. Frankly, they are not important. Control Freak is a wild ride with several over-the-top scenes, whose excesses genre fans will surely appreciate. Recommended for the gross-outs with a satirical edge, Control Freak starts streaming today (3/13) on Hulu.