Film Review: Control Freak (2025)

Director: Shal Ngo

Genre: Horror (Body, Folk)

Format: Streaming

Control Freak opens with successful motivational speaker, Val Nguyen (Kelly Marie Tran), searching for her birth certificate so she may enter China for her upcoming worldwide tour. She has it all – a happy relationship, plenty of money and fame. Yet almost right away, we see she is struggling. She has a strange compulsion of itching the back of her head, sometimes until it bleeds. She hallucinates strange bugs taking over her house, even crawling into her body. Her family is fractured, and she is not close with any of her relatives.

When Val’s aunt does not have her birth certificate, she is forced to visit with her estranged father, a “recovering” addict turned monk, to obtain it. Her visit with her father is reflective of Val’s challenges throughout the rest of the movie: mostly that she doesn’t trust or have close, caring relationships with almost anyone. She even lies to her husband, pretending to want children while actively take birth control and hiding it from him.

During the visit, Val’s father tells her about the Vietnamese folk story of the Sanshi, a parasitic demon that feeds off human suffering, driving its hosts to do unspeakable things to themselves. As the movie wears on, we learn more about Val’s history and why she and her father are estranged. Val’s father was a soldier who was traumatized by his experiences in the Vietnam War. He explains that he brought the Sanshi home with him, where it infected his wife. He then killed her while child Val watched, to keep the Sanshi from destroying them all.

Val doesn’t believe in the Sanshi at first. But as she investigates, the itch at the back of her head grows worse. She scratches and scratches, wearing hats and even binding her hands while sleeping to try – unsuccessfully – to stop her herself. When she finds her father dead of an overdose, Val realizes she must confront the Sanshi and her generational trauma alone.

I really liked the first half of this movie. It’s paced strangely, likely due to it being longer than the story required, but I enjoyed the slow piecing together of Val’s history, and the growing tension around her “itch” and unresolved trauma. Kelly Marie Tran gives a wonderful performance, exuding a maturity I have not seen from her in other roles. The supporting cast is weaker, and the last twenty minutes are a very tough watch. The tone is relentlessly heavy, and one portion of the body horror at the end really stuck with me (which was probably intended!).  

What I found most compelling is the folkloric content and the allegory to the trauma the Vietnam War passed down through generations of Vietnamese. We are repeatedly shown Val driving in her car, itching her head, or images of bugs overtaking food, bodies, and walls. Some reviewers felt the repeated scenes and imagery were superfluous, but I think they worked well to show the relentlessness of trauma and how it “infects” and invades you over time. The movie also shows how trauma makes us hate ourselves, and the impact that has on both our mental capacity and our relationships. The ending worked well for me, being somewhat ambiguous, like recovery from trauma itself, which is always there, waiting to rear its ugly head.

This movie is heavy and will linger on you after watching it. But it’s an important exploration of generational trauma and how we choose to address it. 3/5.

Purchase Link: Available on Hulu

Review By:

Chelsea Catherine
chelseacatherinewriter.com