Kelly Marie Tran deserves better than Control Freak, a frustratingly humorless, self-serious horror flick that plays like an early 2000s retread with nothing new to say. 

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Writer-director Shal Ngo serves up a premise that’s ripe for psychological horror: self-help guru plagued by childhood trauma and maybe, just maybe, possessed by a parasitic demon. But the movie drags those ideas out for nearly two hours of slow-burning, scalp-shredding monotony.

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Tran stars as Val, a wildly successful motivational speaker who preaches self-empowerment but can barely hold it together herself. She’s estranged from her family, still haunted by her mother’s mysterious death, and, worst of all, suffers from an uncontrollable itch on her head.

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And oh, does this movie want you to feel that itch. Val scratches in bed, in the office, in the bathroom, in the bathtub. She scratches until her scalp bleeds, until she’s wrapped her head in gauze like some kind of inspirational mummy. Is it stress? A metaphor? A literal demon? Control Freak spends most of its runtime waffling between possibilities, ultimately settling on … all the above?

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There’s a bureaucratic MacGuffin that forces Val to reconnect with her estranged family – she needs a birth certificate to embark on a world tour – but the plot mostly exists as an excuse for grotesque body horror and cryptic warnings about a “hungry ghost.” Flashbacks to Val’s childhood are meant to be unsettling but feel clumsily inserted, and the film’s editing choices make it feel even more disjointed.

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Ngo’s direction leans on visual tropes that feel borrowed from Stranger Things and The Grudge, with visions of ants swarming, shadowy figures lurking, and intrusive thoughts creeping into Val’s mind. But it’s all so heavy-handed and overlong that any initial intrigue fades into tedium. By the time the film circles back to one of the dumbest Chekhov’s gun payoffs in recent memory, you’ll be itching (sorry not sorry) for the credits to roll.

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Tran gives a committed performance, but she’s stranded in a film that keeps spinning its wheels, unwilling to fully commit to psychological horror, supernatural thrills, or even basic character development. And without anything fresh to say, Control Freak just feels like a humorless, repetitive slog. Even die-hard horror fans might want to skip this one.