Freaks (2019)

Freaks arrives with the modest ambitions of a festival thriller and the good sense not to pretend otherwise. A seven-year-old girl named Chloe has spent her life sealed inside a decaying house by a father who insists the outside world will kill her. What follows is a lean science fiction contraption of mind control, time manipulation, and government containment, assembled by Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein with the efficiency of people who have studied their Spielberg. Lexy Kolker carries the thing on her small shoulders, and the film is content to be a suspense machine. No sermons are delivered. Nobody stands in a doorway explaining the audience's moral obligations.

The cultural inventory here is thin, and the film seems pleased about it. Grace Park appears as a government agent, and the ensemble is mixed in the ordinary way that casts are mixed when nobody is keeping score. Race is never a subject. Neither is sexuality, nor the environment, nor the shape of the economy, nor the politics of the body. The antagonist is a containment force, not a corporation, so there is no wealth to redistribute and no villain to jeer at from a safe distance. A young girl anchors the story and her mother eventually takes flight, which is the kind of image that could be recruited for a thesis. The film declines the recruitment. It wants the image for the image's sake.

Chloe's confinement reads as captivity and strange inheritance, not as any diagnosis. The result is a brisk, competent genre picture that treats its ideas as plot machinery. It has no interest in instructing anyone. That restraint is its own quiet virtue, and in the current climate it is nearly a novelty.