Crew
Director – John Balazs, Screenplay – Mike Gerbino, Producers – John Balazs, Vikki Blinks & Marlane Ghmed, Photography – David Chan, Music – Kai Chen Lim, Special Effects – Georgia Wohlgemuth, Production Design – Danaë Grieef. Production Company – La Rosa Productions.
Cast
Nicola Pastor (Katie), Jordan Fraser-Trumble (Kevin Smith), Stephen Degenaro (Guy), Jasper Bagg (Tommy), Hannah Brooke (Olive), Elizabeth O’Callaghan (Mum), Kasia Mravljak (Vet Receptionist), Geordie K. Poulos (Detective)
Plot
In Melbourne, Katie is struggling to make ends meet as a freelance video editor. She finds that her having edited porn films is working against her getting legitimate editing work. Meanwhile, bills are mounting and she is reliant on the goodwill of her friend Kevin. She then receives an offer of reasonable money to cut some videos. These turn out to be videos that depict acts of violence and a suicide. Examining the videos, Katie realises that the acts of murder being depicted are real and that she has been given snuff movies. Working on these starts to cause Katie’s sanity to fray. When she says she wants nothing to do with it, her mysterious benefactor makes threats against her family.
Freelance was the fifth film for Australian director John Balazs. All of Balazs’s other films have been in the action field with the likes of Ninka Immovable Heart (2014), Dancer (2016), Rage (2021) and Black Site (2022).
There has been no proven example of a snuff movie – a film that depicts acts of murder for real – although the internet is littered with plenty of fakes. That has not stopped a host of films from depicting the subject from the first Found Footage film Snuff (1971) to the likes of Mute Witness (1995), the mainstream 8MM (1999), August Underground (2001) and sequels, The Great American Snuff Film (2003), Snuff-Movie (2005), A Serbian Film (2010) and the extraordinary Amateur Porn Star Killer (2007). Recently we have had the idea of snuff internet sites in films like Demonlover (2002), Untraceable (2008) and The Den (2013), among others. (For a more detailed listing see Snuff Movies).
It took me some time to get into Freelance. A good part of it was that Nicola Pastor is just not an engaging lead. She seems closed off and detached for a good half of the film – even disengaged and disinterested when in bed with Jordan Fraser-Trumble. This makes a certain sense when it comes to her revelations about economically using him later in the film, but not for the most likeable or sympathetic lead. Certainly, as the film goes on, Pastor becomes much better at conveying a sense of shock and horror or just numbly reacting to events on the screen before her. Eventually, you get a real physical sense of her descending into dark places. On the other hand, you cannot help but wonder how much more shocking would have been if the lead had been a more friendly and outgoing character at the outset, even one who displayed her economic anxieties in a more visible manner.
And for quite a time, I was not engaging with John Balazs’ direction. He pulls an initially effective scene with an intruder in Nicola Pastor’s apartment but then ruins it by turning it into a lame dream jump. Furthermore, during the early scenes, we never see what is is that Nicola is editing – the camera crucially shies away when it comes to seeing people killed or the man committing suicide. A film like Freelance needs to be fearless and drag an audience into the darkness with it – to shy away reveals a fatally tame approach to the material that is playing it safe. If there is anything that signals tameness in a film like this, it is seeing Nicola Pastor having sex with Jordan Fraser-Trumble while keeping her underwear on.
Freelance joins a surprising niche of films in the last couple of years that have been about women in their twenties working in the film industry in various capacities and their descent into a dark and disturbed state of mind – see also Censor (2021) and Stopmotion (2023). As we get into the more disturbed state of mind, Freelance starts to fall into the cliches of this sort of the film – that of the all-powerful cabal of people who are secretly watching everything that Nicola Pastor does and make veiled threats against her family and those around her in order to draw her in deeper. We have seen this sort of things in films like The Den and Unfriended: Dark Web (2018). Not to mention the police are astonishingly casual to the point of disinterested when she goes to them – at the very least, you would expect them to examine the evidence she offers – to the point of the scene being unbelievable.
Eventually, Freelance finds quite a dark place that it draws you inside. I wasn’t engaged with either Nicola Pastor as a lead nor John Balazs’s style at the outset but there was a point somewhere before the end where I realised that the film had carried you into some dark places and was doing not too badly. I liked the way that we see Nicola casually stepping over moral lines and becoming indifferent to what she is doing. There are a suitable number of twists that come in the last quarter and the final image the film goes out on is a potent one.
Trailer here