Freaks 2019

I really, really hated this movie. I am perplexed by the high ratings. Where do I even begin?

It started off interesting enough, with the very pressing question of what the ever living hell was going on. I understand that the ongoing confusion was meant to lead up to the gradual reveal and that much was fine, but oh my god, practically everything else about this was a heaping pile of shit.

It wasn’t even an overly long film but it felt like it just dragged on and on, with no end in sight. By the time we’d finally reached the last 20 minutes I was desperate for it to be over. If I hadn’t been watching with someone else I would have have been griping out loud nonstop and probably checking how much time was left every 2 minutes. It was so bad. I was so annoyed and so bored by how excruciatingly bad it got.

The not Jack Black dumb dad pulled some magic bubble crap in order to slow time to try and raise his kid in secrecy to present as "normal" to the rest of the world. He thought he could achieve this by keeping her cooped up inside one place and only in contact with one person for 7 years. If he wanted her to have a chance at resembling anything close to normal he should have, oh, I don’t know, raised her as fucking normally as possible!

I don’t know that it’s perfectly clear, but it seems to me that he had to know all along that Chloe did in fact have powers and was just outright ignoring them and trying to pretend they didn’t exist, while simultaneously feeding her a bunch of lies to spout off to all other people she might be allowed to talk to one day in the future to cover up their possible existence, and without anything more than vague, half-ass reasons to her as to the whys behind it all.

I mean, at what point did he even learn that she did in fact have these “Freak” abilities? Was he certain from the get go because both him and her mother had them or did it become apparent in her first few years or did he really raise her that way for that long without knowing for sure until some point during what’s shown in this craptastic film? Some more background would have been sensible information to share with the viewers, because his actions never made enough sense.

Would it really have not made more sense to say to Chloe something along the lines of, “Hey honey. So you can (maybe) do this unique thing that not everyone can, but if you’re not careful you can frighten others when you do it and get into a whole mess of trouble, and that’s why you’ve got to learn to keep it in check and learn to control it and not let it control you,” and so on and so forth. He did her no favors by keeping her in the dark and expecting the dull life she was leading and his non-answer answers to her very valid questions to just simply be enough.

At what point did dumb dad decide the plan was to “teach her to be normal” and pass Chloe off to another family? If she really needed to go by the name, Eleanor, then why didn’t he stick to always calling her that and drop her real name entirely? How did he seriously expect her to blend right in with this other family and come across as completely normal when she’d never been exposed to normal and he was telling her things like, “Ice cream trucks are full of frozen dead kid bodies!” He should have been setting positive, normal expectations of a normal life with a normal family in her head. He should have been pushing excitement around the idea of things like eventually being able to go to the park to play. Doing so might have been the key to getting her to follow his rules, instead of only ever insisting how unsafe it was for her outside without ever fully explaining why. Maybe she would have been more inclined to stay inside and perfect his idea of “being normal” if getting ice cream with Harper regularly was a touted reward rather than only ever being blasted about some unseen danger.

Speaking of ice cream, how was it that dumb dad forgot to get ice cream when going to get it is what prompted him to go out in the first place? It was the thing that was supposed to bribe his kid to stay safely inside. Convincing her to do so was supposedly the most important thing.

Also, why was he nearly getting killed just for going out? Could he not just pretend to be a normal person out and about doing normal things, like buying groceries? It sort of seemed implied that being attacked on supply runs wasn’t surprising. It was so incredibly dangerous for him to simply leave the house. Why was that exactly? Were people checked as they went in the door to any business? If so, couldn’t he just clean his cheeks well before heading out? Were there wanted posters with his face on them? What actually happened for him to get hurt like that just getting food? Was he stealing instead of using some of the literal stacks of money he had? Wouldn’t he have been more likely to have been shot? Would it not draw unwanted attention for him to run to his house with a shopping cart while bleeding from his torso? Would that not invite suspicion from others and get the cops called to come check things out?

Now, for the biggest issue of all. Fuck. that. kid. Seriously. Any empathy I had for Chloe in the beginning quickly vanished as the film progressed. I never blamed her for her curiosity about the outside world or her desire to be able to do the things she found out other kids were allowed to do, but her behavior past that was appalling, and at times downright creepy. Was her petulant attitude and sense of entitlement all supposed to be a product of her worldly isolation? Did her dad just forget to teach her the basics of right and wrong? What the hell was wrong with her? I suppose it was expected for her to be messed up considering the circumstances, but she was somewhere beyond any such expectation. She was a bonafide little psycho monster.

Her concern was minimal and short-lived when her dad came into the house with an open, bleeding wound. She barely hesitated when a stranger she’d only just met gave her something to drug him with for the supposed purpose of making him sleep so she could sneak out again, when she was currently already snuck out while he was sleeping, and he was depicted as constantly passed out all the time anyway. She wished him dead to his face, threatened to make him dead herself, and nearly did make him dead herself. Then, when he actually died, while saving her bratty, cold staring ass, she was heartbroken and crying about it? Yeah, no. Why would she suddenly care?

I don’t know how her dad withstood it as everything he’d been working so hard to manage for so long began to go so wrong. He’d been sleeping as little as possible for 7 years straight and was under a constant strain, from all the worry and reason behind holding that protective bubble, and raising what turned out to be a heinous child. I don’t know how he didn’t break or throw in the towel once Chloe kept not only showing a total disregard to the fact that he was trying to protect her, but began bossing him around by threat of actual death. I’m sure the idea behind that was supposed to be about how he was her father and would do anything for her no matter what. Maybe that’s realistic to a certain extent, but so would him abandoning her to do whatever the fuck she wanted since she was gonna do it anyway. I certainly wouldn’t have blamed him. He didn’t seem like an entirely bad guy, just a dumb one. Maybe he could have started over somewhere new and stretched out time just to be with the ones he loved.

The characters I cared most about were the non-lead “normies.” Like the two people who were stabbed in the eye with a fucking pen and then gunned down! Chloe did the stabbing one of those times. Then her dad stopped her from murdering a dude with just, “No, no.” No brief add on that hurting other people is a bad thing.

There was a moment when the dumb dad said he “never wanted the world to turn her into a Freak.” But really, did he just make Chloe one himself by keeping her locked away and from the truth?

A big question is how did all this even start? Who was the first person to be named a Freak? Did someone eat a rotten bat or step in something bright green and toxic from a nuclear plant? Come on, what happened? Where did these extraordinary abilities come from?

Also, what were other Freaks like? We’re only ever exposed to 4 of them. Were they overall evil-like and just out for their own gain or were most just unique from the norm and trying to lead regular lives? Were many of them out there hiding in fear of discovery from those who misunderstood them and were justly scared because a handful of their “kind” had done horrible things? I kept waiting for some underlying theme where the Freaks were portrayed as just ordinary people and only needed the right help and guidance in learning how to control their powers.

The more I think about it the more I find wrong with this movie.

The dumb dad never told Chloe about Madoc Mountain, yet when she casually brought it up he never outright asked her how she knew about it. He asked her a couple of yes or no questions like he was playing some guessing game, but he never just said something straight forward like, “It’s important that you tell me how you know about the mountain.”

The Harper kid never mentioned to her parents that Chloe had been randomly showing up in her bedroom in the middle of the night? She didn’t find that unusual or annoying enough to bring up in hopes that they could help it stop?

How is it that Chloe would not be terrified of other people? Why would it only take a single pop-up book about the ice cream man to reassure her not to worry at all about approaching him when the one person she’d always had and depended on had drilled it into her her entire life that she could be bringing danger to their door just by being seen from inside the house? Facts and actions do not line up well in this story.

Freaks is such a lame name given for these people with super powers. What about Bleeders? The term was used when the cops thought they were shooting down one of them. It’s at least fitting; it’s what happens when they use their abilities and it certainly sounds more alarming than Freaks. From what details we’re given, it seems as though the Freaks may have been reasonably driven out from everyone else. The mother was described as someone so powerful that everyone was afraid of her. What the hell did she do to earn that reputation? And what kind of hell spawn did she create?

All of that and more to end up where? With Chloe insisting to her mom that they go and do as they wish because if anyone bothers them she knows how to “stop” them. Great. Just great. This kid’s gonna fuck up anyone who ever dares to defy her, eventually maybe even her own mother. How heartwarming.