Freaks is a strange movie, and one that really should be watched without any prior knowledge. So if you want to learn its secrets firsthand and without expectation or disappointment, stop reading now.
We begin inside a closed-up house, reminiscent of The Walking Dead or Bird Box, in which a father (Emile Hirsch) teaches his daughter Chloe (Lexy Kolker) how to lie in a speech to be delivered if she's ever caught. We don't know what's outside, and neither does Chloe. We assume it's a sort of post-apocalyptic world, but the father does occasionally go outside for supplies with no visible protection or weapons. But in her few moments of isolation, she peeps through to the sunlit outside and seems enamored by what she sees, especially an ice cream truck driven by Mr. Snowcone himself. Soon she sneaks out to the ice cream truck, and Mr. Snowcone (Bruce Dern) takes her on a ride away from her house.
It's a chilling start, all the more so because we have no idea what's happening, why the secretive dialogue, or who to trust. Is the father being protective, or is he abusing her? Is Mr. Snowcone a kindly old man, a dangerous predator, or something even worse? And what exactly is happening in this strange world in which people's eyes sometimes bleed? Turns out, it's a world like you might see in X-Men, where certain individuals are born with, shall we say, uncanny powers to read minds, turn invisible, or fly. These individuals are known even by the government as "freaks" whose eyes bleed if they overexert their powers, and they are accused in the media of running loose as illegal citizens and hiding in plain sight, slapping us in the face with the real-life relevance of the immigration crisis.
The film is remarkably difficult to swallow, especially since we learn everything with -- and filtered by -- the young girl at its heart. People explain their world and powers in ways she might understand, though we are well aware there's always more going on than they say. And, possibly because of her age, things aren't always clearly happening in reality versus in her head, and almost everything is sentimentalized despite the film's attempts at grit and violence. But once all the players are on the screen and the board is set for a final sequence, I found myself utterly distractable, predicting each step in the otherwise rote plotline, wishing all the fuss amounted to more. The mutants -- or whatever they are -- are far better characters than superheroes, and so their powers are largely pointless apart from getting between plot points. I'd rather watch X-Men.
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