Freaky (2020) review

Much has been said about how the horror genre has been experiencing a major resurgence over the past few years, especially when it comes to those who have helped make it happen. Filmmakers like Jordan Peele, Mike Flanagan and Ari Aster have been responsible for some of the most critically acclaimed horror projects in recent memory, from Peele’s Get Out (which won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay) to Flanagan’s TV series adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. However, if there’s one filmmaker who has largely flown under the radar when it comes to their noteworthy contributions to the genre, that would be Christopher Landon. While Landon has been involved in the film industry since the mid-’90s, he truly got his big break in the 2010s when he started working for what has arguably been the horror genre’s most prominent studio of the past decade, Blumhouse Productions. There, he penned the screenplays for the second, third, and fourth installments of the studio’s massively successful Paranormal Activity franchise, which then led to him directing the fifth film in the series, 2014’s Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones. However, his biggest hit with Blumhouse would come in 2017 when he directed Happy Death Day, a horror-themed spin on ‘time loop’ stories such as Groundhog Day and Edge of Tomorrow in which a college student is killed on her birthday and finds herself reliving the same day until she finds out who her killer is. Bolstered by its status as an online viral sensation, the film was a major commercial hit and was also generally well-received by critics. It was then followed by an equally successful sequel in 2019, Happy Death Day 2U, and a third film is currently in the works. But until then, Landon has crafted another horror film based around a non-horror concept (in this case, a body-swap comedy inspired by Mary Rogers’ 1972 novel Freaky Friday) with Freaky, in which a teenaged girl finds herself switching bodies with a notorious serial killer. And with a pair of great performances from its two leads, Freaky proves to be another smash hit from both its director and its studio.

In the town of Blissfield, Millie Kessler (Kathryn Newton) is your average teenager who’s just trying to deal with the daily struggles of high school. It’s also been a year since the death of her father, which has led to her having strained relationships with both her mother Paula (Katie Finneran), who’s resorted to daily bouts of drinking ever since, and her older sister Charlene (Dana Drori), a local police officer. And if that wasn’t enough, Blissfield is soon threatened by the return of a notorious serial killer known as the Blissfield Butcher (Vince Vaughn), who was long considered to be nothing more than an urban legend. Millie ends up running into the Butcher one night after her high school’s homecoming football game, and while she does manage to survive this ordeal, she quickly learns that this will not be the end of her troubles. Since the Butcher used an ancient Aztec dagger known as La Dola when he tried to kill her, it causes the two of them to switch places, with Millie ending up in the Butcher’s body and the Butcher in hers. And despite the initial struggles that he faces in adapting to his new body, the Butcher immediately sets off on a new killing spree, with Millie’s classmates at the top of his list. Thus, with only 24 hours to switch her and the Butcher back to their original bodies, Millie and her best friends Nyla (Celeste O’Connor) and Josh (Misha Osherovich) find themselves in a race against time to retrieve La Dola and use it on the Butcher before Millie’s stuck in the Butcher’s body forever, especially since his identity has now been made public.

Just like the Happy Death Day films, Freaky fully relishes in being a horror-themed spin on its traditionally non-horror premise. Despite a bit of a slow start, the film then proceeds to produce a lot of great humor which, naturally, stems from all the hi-jinx that ensues from the main protagonist trying to adjust to her new body. With that said, this film very much belongs to Vince Vaughn, who’s utterly fantastic in the role of a teenaged girl trapped in a middle-aged man’s body. But while she doesn’t get to work with the film’s comedy as much as Vaughn does since she’s primarily playing the killer in the main protagonist’s body, Kathryn Newton is just as excellent whether she’s playing the sinister antagonist or the sympathetic protagonist. On that note, another thing that director Christopher Landon has been incredibly successful at when it comes to his recent films is his ability to craft some highly effective moments of emotional poignancy. In the case of Happy Death Day, it was by way of the arc that main protagonist Tree Gelbman went through after initially starting out as an utterly shallow ‘mean girl’. Freaky takes this in a slightly different direction by having Millie be a wholly endearing heroine from the start though, like Tree, her character arc also revolves around a strained relationship with her family members. Plus, whereas the Happy Death Day films were under the limits of the wider-appealing PG-13 rating (to be clear, though, that’s not a bad thing in their case…), Freaky is very much an R-rated affair and fans of the genre will be pleased to know that it features some delightfully crazy kills. And so, because of all this, Freaky is a solidly entertaining horror flick that’s fully bolstered by Vince Vaughn and Kathryn Newton’s phenomenal performances in the lead roles, and while he may not necessarily be a household name yet as far as the horror genre is concerned, it’s nice to see that Christopher Landon has arguably found his niche within it.

Rating: 4/5