Fantasia 2026 Review: ‘Freaks Part II’ is a Brilliant and Thoughtful Sequel

Closing out the Cheval Noir competition and the Fantasia International Film Festival as a whole, Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein return to Montreal after the success of Freaks. While they’ve since diverted to Hollywood with Final Destination Bloodlines and have other movies in the works at the studio level (most notably, a Venom animated film, a Metal Gear Solid adaptation, and writing the screenplay for Gremlins 3, the latter of which will be directed by Chris Columbus), they also shot Freaks Part II, which had its world premiere at Fantasia last night. 

A few days after the festival began, it was announced that Paramount had acquired U.S. distribution rights to the film (while Elevation Pictures will handle the Canadian release), a massive win for the duo of filmmakers who made quite the splash at both TIFF and Fantasia with the original Freaks seven years ago. Lipovsky and Stein make no pretense that their film, which focuses on a group of superpowered individuals (played in the original by Emile Hirsch, Bruce Dern, Amanda Crew, and Lexy Kolker) hunted down by a society that fears them, seems heavily inspired by X-Men. 

The two share (very) similar premises, even if Freaks is mostly confined to one location, as Hirsch’s overprotective Henry Lewis attempts to protect his family from further harm. However, you haven’t seen anything yet with Freaks Part II, which has even starker similarities to the Marvel comics, by expanding upon their version of the Mutant Response Division, dubbed the “Abnormal Defense Force” (ADF). Their hold in America has grown increasingly prevalent, notably after Mary Lewis (Crew) destroyed an entire ADF facility with her powers. 

Alongside her daughter, Chloe (now played by Lorelei Olivia Mote), the two attempt to find Erica Lang (Lili Taylor), the ADF officer who killed their sister, now a high-ranking agent who has been hunting down Mary since she assassinated the baby in cold blood. Meanwhile, Chloe doesn’t want to help her mother and instead seeks a friend she sees in her visions, thinking she is more important than vowing revenge, because it won’t bring her sister back. 

What follows is a surprisingly thoughtful examination of a crumbling, fascist America, with stark parallels to what’s unfolding today. And there is no coincidence, too. During the premiere’s Q&A, after being asked a question from journalist Alexandre Royal Pelletier, who wondered if the ADF was a parallel to ICE, Stein expressed that “you can definitely see echoes of the real world coming into this story,” and that Freaks was written when Donald Trump was running for office for the first time: 

“The way that ICE is working right now is also the way that other things have happened in history, in other places, that target, discriminate against people, and use government power to arrest and kill people in the name of ‘safety.’ It’s a horrible, unfortunate cycle of fascism that we see again and again in world history. [Freaks] is intentionally a mishmash of things that are currently happening, or have happened, in order to use a sci-fi lens to look at patterns in our world. One of the things we love is when people bring their own perspectives and things that they recognize from their own family or cultural histories. They bring it to [the first Freaks] and tell us, “This is just like what happened in my country, or my culture.” Without saying, “It’s all about this,” we sometimes feel so powerless watching things unfold, but art can say something and create empathy.”

That’s why the parallels feel so stark and intentionally direct. It can often feel terrifying to see a summer camp filled with children of ADF agents being brainwashed and indoctrinated to fear the other (in this case, the “freaks”) simply because they contain powers the human race does not understand. All Mary and Chloe want is to live in safety and comfort. Hell, all Chloe wants is to have a friend – a real one that understands her for who she is, not for the powers she has. Bar none, the film’s most devastating scene occurs when Chloe attempts to infiltrate an arcade and make friends. At first, the girls who speak to her seem welcoming, until they find out she is a freak. 

Chloe is so utterly broken that she controls the minds of both girls and makes them sit on a swing. They’re difficult scenes that Lipovsky and Stein tackle, especially in the fallout when one parent finds out Mary is in the arcade, and calls the ADF, who don’t hesitate to launch a hellfire missile in the building, with innocent civilians present, to “rid themselves” of the freaks inside. The violence is especially unpleasant to watch, and purposefully so, especially when shots are fired, and the bloodletting becomes more of a statement than an act of “protection.” In earlier scenes, the directorial duo confronts the audience with genuinely harrowing visions of a dystopian United States that isn’t as far off as it seems. 

In these sequences, Lorelei Olivia Mote has the difficult task of portraying a broken Chloe living in this desolate world without hope for the future, while all she wants is to go to school and make a friend. The task might seem difficult, but the performance is so emotionally deep that we feel for her plight even when things take an even darker turn than the film’s tragic opening scene. Crew and Taylor are also great counterparts to Mote’s performance as Chloe, with the latter being a total polar opposite of the politician she played in the second season of Daredevil: Born Again, who opposes any form of authoritarianism and attempts to bring the despot in power down. 

While there’s a midpoint twist that’s fairly predictable for anyone to guess, it doesn’t stop Lipovsky and Stein from staging a bevy of creative (and surprisingly) fun scenes where gore is at the forefront. The visual effects in the last Freaks might have been minimalist and less convincing, but their experience working on Final Destination Bloodlines definitely helped them figure out how to stage gore effectively on a lower budget than their previous film (but a little higher than the first Freaks). There are some definite surprises (notably one involving Stephen Toblowsky’s character that caught me – and the entire Fantasia audience – off-guard) that feel inspired by their experience staging the gnarliest death scenes possible, but it makes this entry of the Freaks franchise a more memorable outing than their previous go-around. 

It was a good way to end a relatively enjoyable 30th edition of Fantasia, which has once again given us the opportunity to immerse ourselves in the most creative form of cinematic expression. When the festival opened with Her Private Hell, director Nicolas Winding Refn proudly stated, in front of a sold-out crowd, that “Genre is cinema!” After three weeks of watching films, both new and old, from countries around the world, and capping it off with a surprisingly thought-provoking meditation on our effed up world before Lipovsky and Stein go back to Hollywood with Venom, Metal Gear Solid, or whatever else they have cooking next, truer words have never been spoken. 

SCORE: ★★★