Freaks - they look like us
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Freaks - they look like us |
| Original title | Freaks |
| Country of production | United States , Canada |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 2018 |
| length | 105 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director |
Adam Stein , Zach Lipovsky |
| script | Adam Stein, Zach Lipovsky |
| production | Adam Stein, Zach Lipovsky, Jordan Barber, Mitchell Waxman |
| music | Tim Wynn |
| camera | Stirling Bancroft |
| cut | Sabrina Pitre |
| occupation | |
| |
Freaks is an American-Canadian science fiction - thriller from the year 2018 . The directors are Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky , who also wrote the script.
action
Seven-year-old Chloe lives with her father in a rundown house. All windows are covered, the father always warns Chloe urgently of the dangers “out there” and forbids her to leave the apartment and even look through the window. He himself only occasionally leaves the house to get new supplies and takes a gun with him. Chloe knows nothing else but the house where she has lived since the beginning of her memories and where she is tutored by her father. Her mother Mary is dead, according to her father. Her father has drummed into her a dummy identity whose key data (name, address, hobbies) she should recite if she ever met “those out there”. At night Chloe dreams of a person who may be her mother and of Harper, a child in the neighborhood, with whom she plays scenes from a normal life against his will.
When Chloe hears a tune from outside the house, she tears a piece of a curtain and forbidden looks outside. There she sees an ice cream van that arouses her interest. She asks her father for ice cream until he promises to get some "outside" for her. He is shot while trying and returns without ice but with a severe gunshot wound. Chloe is so fixated on the ice that she ignores her injured father and leaves the house for the first time.
The property around the house is overgrown and overgrown. It is located in a quiet suburb in a city in the United States. On the street, Chloe meets the ice cream truck. The owner, the older Mr. Snowcone, lures them into his ice cream truck with the prospect of ice cream and a visit to a playground. He drives her to a park and lets her use the playground while he continues to question her about her life, suggesting that Chloe has "special skills." A strange thing actually happens: when a police officer suspects that Mr. Snowcone is not a relative of the girl and wants to arrest him, Chloe can persuade him to forget the scene and go on his way through sheer willpower. On the way back, Mr. Snowcone gives her a photo of a woman who allegedly represents Chloe's mother and explains that it is his daughter and that she is still alive. Back at her father's house, Chloe quickly becomes estranged from him. She focuses on her hope of finding her mother and makes it clear that she should no longer hide in the house from a danger that she cannot understand.
On another excursion with Mr. Snowcone it turns out that he is not acting out of altruistic motives. He takes Chloe to a meeting with the policewoman Ray in a restaurant and offers her Chloe as a "special person" on the condition that the police take both Chloe and him to an undefined mountain. The shocked Chloe flees into the kitchen of the restaurant, Mr. Snowcone follows her. Policewoman Ray gets her team in position to have both shot, but Mr. Snowcone and Chloe escape from the hopeless kitchen by making Chloe and himself invisible and then fleeing in the ice cream van. Chloe uses the power of his mind to force him to drive her to her father, who jumps through a time-warping bubble in front of the ice cream truck just before her house. It turns out that Mr. Snowcone is his father-in-law. Out of anger about the alleged kidnapping, he arrests him in the house.
The threads slowly come together for the viewer: Due to an unknown event, people suffered heritable mutations that endowed them with special abilities. They are branded and hunted as "freaks" or "abnormal" by the government. The freaks have different skills. Chloe's father can create time bubbles and make time go by more slowly while he's awake. He and Chloe have lived in their home for seven years, while outside of the home only a few months have passed since an unspecified incident in which, to the father's knowledge, his wife, Chloe's mother, was killed. Mr. Snowcone, real name Allan, is the father of Chloe's mother and can make himself invisible. Chloe can impose her will on people. There is an unspecified "mountain" that the government takes freaks to and which, for unspecified reasons, appears to be a safe place for them. There, Allan knows, is Mary, Chloe's mother, and is said to be still alive.
Chloe has a vision of her mother who is being held in a secret laboratory inside the "mountain" and is about to be killed. The father and Allan can follow what is happening visually, Chloe can even communicate with her mother and take out a doctor who wants to kill the mother. She takes control of a military man who is present, lets her mother free and helps her escape through the corridors of the laboratory. Meanwhile, the police have been able to trace Allan and Chloe's tracks, and officer Ray rings the doorbell. The father can briefly play a harmless role for her, but Ray quickly sees through it. She shoots her father, hits him dangerously and storms upstairs, where she meets Chloe. She shoots the girl, but the bullet gets stuck in the air - the invisible Allan had thrown himself protectively in front of the girl and is dying from the gunshot wound. Ray also dies because Chloe orders her to put the gun under her chin. The father, who was also fatally wounded, was able to hold up the rushing police with the last of his strength until Chloe enabled her mother to escape from the "mountain", then a missile guided by the government hit the house. The father dies, but the arriving mother, who can fly as a special ability, saves her daughter from the rubble and flies away with her.
History of origin
For director Stein Freaks is the first job as a film director. He had previously worked primarily as a film editor and director of the US science fiction television series Mech-X4 . Co-writer and director Lipovsky has previously directed a number of films, including Dead Rising: Watchtower . Both worked as TV directors at Disney and spent several years writing the scripts for Freaks in their spare time . They were influenced by political events during this time, especially the elections in the United States in 2016 , whose election campaign was characterized by a xenophobic mood and as a result of which the new government on the Mexican border deliberately separated children of refugee mothers from their families. The financing and the shooting dragged on like the writing of the script over several years. According to Stein and Lipovsky, the script was written with a view to watching the film again, so the details of the plot only revealed on second viewing. In order to achieve an appealing result despite the low budget, the directors imitated the later shooting with the cameras of their mobile phones and people who happened to be present in order to get a feel for the scenes to be shot without using expensive filming time with the real actors and employees . They also required all actors involved to be available for two days of shooting during post-production in order to be able to re-shoot individual scenes at no additional cost. After all, the main roles in the script were deliberately designed to be complex and demanding in order to give well-known actors an incentive to act despite the small budget. The film was shot in Lipovsky's hometown of Vancouver .
Premiere had Freaks on 8 September 2018 at the Toronto International Film Festival . The marketing rights for the English-speaking countries were then auctioned for two million US dollars by Well Go USA Entertainment, who announced a theatrical release. Other festivals that screened Freaks were the Argentine Mar del Plata Film Festival , the Belgian Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival , the Canadian Vancouver International Film Festival and the Spanish Sitges Festival . In Germany, the film was shown in September 2019 at the Fantasy Film Festival . It opened in theaters in the United States and Canada on September 13, 2019. On the opening weekend, the film grossed $ 160,000.
After working on Freaks , Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky stayed together and directed the Disney film Kim Possible together .
reception
| Ratings | |
| Sydney Morning Herald | 3.5 / 5 |
| Meta-ratings | |
| Rotten tomatoes | 88% |
Freaks received positive reviews almost across the board. The Rotten Tomatoes review database aggregates 80 reviews to an overall rating of 88%. Reviewer Paul Byrnes of the Sydney Morning Herald called the film a "manual for the love of film". He pointed out that the viewer needs a long time to understand the twisted logic of the world of the father-daughter team, only to be thrown into the deep end again afterwards when the eponymous “freaks” use their skills to achieve another Bring dimension to the film. Byrnes compared the situation of the "freaks" with that of the Dutch Jews who had to hide from the Nazis in 1940. He praised the “amazing” performance of the seven-year-old leading actress Lexy Kolker at the time of shooting , who showed the vulnerability, the emotional range and the blazing temperament of her character. For the Los Angeles Times , editor Gary Goldstein stated that as a fan of the genre you can enjoy the movie even if you don't fully understand it. He assessed that Stein and Lipovsky understood their craft in visual terms, but still had to work on the narrative: the film was "worth seeing and amazing, but also silly and contradicting". For the Hollywood Reporter , editor Justin Lowe saw the near-future United States depicted in the film as a dystopia of fear and government manipulation that bears strong links to current political developments in the United States. He noted that the film clearly had a low budget, but that only shows in the small number of locations; the few special effects in the film were extremely successful. Lowe criticized the fact that the story temporarily lost momentum in between.
Freaks won the BC Emerging Filmmaker Award at the Vancouver International Film Festival . At the Trieste Science + Fiction Festival it was awarded the main prize "Asteroide" as best film. At the Utopiales in Nantes , France , he won the audience award.
Web links
- Freaks - They look like us in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Trailer on YouTube
Individual evidence
- ↑ Release certificate for freaks - you look like us . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry (PDF).
- ↑ Zeit.de: Apparently, significantly more families separated on the border with Mexico. Retrieved June 16, 2020 .
- ↑ HollywoodReporter.com: How 'Freaks' Filmmakers Finally Got to Tell Their Story. Retrieved September 23, 2019 .
- ↑ NSNews.com: Freaks got made with local support and lots of favors. Retrieved June 16, 2020 .
- ↑ Deadline.com: Well Go In $ 2 Million Deal For 'Freaks'. Retrieved September 23, 2019 .
- ↑ BoxOfficeMojo.com: Freaks. Retrieved September 23, 2019 .
- ↑ a b SMH.com.au: Pungent horror Freaks a calling card for its talent. Retrieved September 23, 2019 .
- ↑ a b Freaks - They look like us at Rotten Tomatoes (English)
- ↑ LATimes.com: Review: Emile Hirsch, Bruce Dern elevate sci-fi horror flick 'Freaks'. Retrieved September 23, 2019 .
- ↑ HollywoodReporter.com: 'Freaks': Film Review. Retrieved September 23, 2019 .
- ↑ Miss604.com: VIFF Award Winners 2018. Retrieved September 23, 2019 .
- ↑ ScienceFictionFestival.org: The Winners Of Trieste Science + Fiction Festival 2018. Retrieved September 23, 2019 .
- ↑ SciFiPortal.eu: Utopiales - 19th International Science Fiction Festival. Retrieved September 23, 2019 .