Hulu’s Control Freak introduced us to a parasitic monster referred to as “Sanshi,” which, as per the Daoist or Taoist philosophy, is also known as “Three Corpses” or “Three Worms.” In the film, the three corpses likely correspond to Val’s father, Sang, her mother, and her younger self. For the “Three Worms,” the English spelling is slightly different. It is called “Sanchong,” where “San” means three and “chong” refers to a parasite like a bug, leech, or insect (ant) in the film’s context. Throughout the film, Valerie, or Val, the lead protagonist, kept seeing ants crawling out of everywhere in her house, because that’s what she saw at the time of her mother’s death. You can say that the image of ants crawling on her mother’s corpse was seared into young Val’s mind and stayed with her like a parasite for the rest of her childhood, only to surface years later when someone questioned her nationality, because of which she was forced to revisit her past, i.e., make contact with her father, Sang Nguyen, to ask for her birth certificate.
Spoiler Alert
What Is Sanshi?
Control Freak has kept the explanation of “Sanshi” extremely simple, mostly because the original Daoist text is too old and too complicated with a plethora of interpretations from different philosophers over the years. In short, it’s a rabbit hole no one would like to jump into for their own sanity. According to folklore, these Sanshi enter the hosts at birth and live inside one of the three dantians (also known as energy centers). They are found inside either a host’s abdomen, chest, or head. And once the host is dead, Sanshi leaves their body and eventually turns into an evil ghost. The film further established that this parasite can be passed on to one’s descendants, meaning the entire family becomes a victim of this menacing spirit.
In the film, Val’s father, Sang, called the demon a “hungry ghost” or “hungry parasite.” Both these creatures feed on human misery, past trauma, fears, and misdeeds. I guess most of us know what parasites are, but the reason why the film calls the “Sanshi” a ghost is because in Asian folklore,ghosts represent the souls of the dead people trapped in the human world with some unfinished business. In the case of Sang, the woman he killed during the Vietnam War eventually became the ghost that haunted him throughout his life. And maybe this ghost was eventually passed on to Val’s mother after Sang returned home. After her mother’s death, the same spirit became a part of her and stayed hidden in some dark corner of her head. Or maybe it was the ghost of Val’s mother that had been haunting Val in her adulthood as Val’s mother wanted the family curse to come to an end. However, for some reason, I am not quite happy with my own ghost theory, and therefore in Val’s case, I would consider Sanshi a “hungry parasite” that represented the generational trauma that ran deep in her family. Val locked away her past memories and refused to acknowledge her mother’s death, which, in time, manifested into a monster eventually forcing her to face her fears.
What Did Sanshi Symbolize?
Val’s father, Sang, a war veteran who was likely a part of the South Vietnamese army during the Vietnam War, regretted killing his own countrymen on the battlefield. In one of the visions, we saw him killing a teenage rebel on the rice paddies… something that haunted him throughout his lifetime. I believe a guilt-ridden Sang brought these horrors home after the war ended and shared his regrets with his wife. Well, I guess “shared” could be the wrong word here, as the police found signs of violent struggle and domestic abuse on the corpse of Val’s mother, suggesting her father might have been suffering from acute PTSD after the war and had assaulted his wife multiple times, which eventually forced her to kill her own daughter to save her from eternal suffering. Both Val and Sang had a blurred memory of the past and were trying to forget that tragic day which could have transformed into guilt or regret overtime. Val, who was a firsthand witness to such abuse, bottled up her childhood experiences in some very dark corner of her head after her mother’s death. She likely wanted to forget everything as a coping mechanism, but it all came back to her as she was preparing for her “Unstoppable Tour” to China. I truly believe that Sang is the root of all evil in this story because it all started with him, but the question here is: why did Sang’s wife (Val’s mother) become a victim of Sanshi?
Correct me if I am not but I don’t think that a wife ought to suffer the consequences of her husband’s sins, which makes me certain that it was Sang, the drug addict and an abusive man, who murdered his wife to hide his own crimes. In short, Sang killed his wife, not to save their daughter or because she was possessed by Sanshi, but because Sang himself was a disturbed man who couldn’t silence the demons in his head and therefore ended up destroying his whole family. And in the end, this sinner became a saint and hid himself in the Golden Grove Monastery. He later died of a drug overdose. However, if this theory sounds wrong, then maybe Val’s mother was mentally disturbed for reasons unknown and she passed on the same parasite to her daughter, which was why Sang pointed out that the monster was in her blood. And maybe Val was never able to honor her mother’s mental illness and lived in denial.
Meanwhile, Val’s traumatic childhood memories returned the moment her manager, Crystal, told her that she needed a birth certificate to gain entry into China for her upcoming tour. At the back of her head, Val knew that she would need to contact her estranged father to get the documents, and the very thought of facing her father again caused her stress that manifested itself in the form of a chronic itch on her head. Control Freak pointed out that Sanshi could regenerate itself, which suggests a person’s grief could return anytime in life and start to haunt them as before, no matter how many times they have overcome it or made peace with it in the past. It could be possible that Val had always known that her father had killed her mother, but she didn’t want to revisit those memories, which was why she kept herself away from the vicious man.
Why Didn’t Val Want Kids?
One of the reasons why Val was so afraid of becoming a mother was because she feared she would subject her child to the same trauma. As mentioned earlier, the only way to get rid of Sanshi was to kill the host, which will eventually end the itch-scratch cycle. In Val’s case, a part of herself wanted to survive and therefore made constant efforts to take control of her life and overcome her itching trauma by killing the parasite inside her, but the other part of her, which was already in Sanshi’s possession, wanted her to give up and kill herself instead to end her pain and suffering. It was these fears, buried deep inside her, that both consciously and subconsciously stopped her from becoming a mother, and she kept popping the pills behind her husband’s back because she didn’t want to pass on her trauma onto her newborn. However, in the end, when she finally overcame her grief and defeated the monster for the time being, she let herself embrace motherhood, though she knew that Sanshi, just like her dreadful memories, could come back anytime in the near future, and this time around, she couldn’t let herself give in, like her mother, as then her kid would have to face the same consequences.
In the closing shot, Val saw an ant crawling on her newborn’s face implying that the monster might still be there. It could hint that in the end, Val eventually passed on the parasite to her kid and her newborn is gonna suffer just like her. It could also be possible that Val might be imagining the whole scene standing near a similar lake where her mother died to give herself a sense of motherhood, which she might never be able to achieve in real life. Also, I believe that Val’s husband, Robbie, left her, even though she requested him to stay. I mean, he was kind of freaked out, and she’d lied to him on multiple occasions, so he obviously didn’t have any reason to stay. Though one thing I am not quite sure of is how Robbie saw the monster in the pool in the film’s ending. Was it real, or did Val imagine the whole thing? Well, if I am missing something here, then do let me know in the comments below.
How Did Val Defeat Sanshi?
Throughout the film, Val had been trying to set a record holding her breath underwater. At first it all looked like a normal thing. However, if you connect it with her mother’s death, and how her mother tried to drown her in childhood, it would possibly suggest that all this while Val had been trying to gather strength to fight her past trauma so she could defeat her own demons without her father’s interference.
In Control Freak’s ending, Val struggled to put up a fight against the Sanshi and defeat the monster, but no matter how hard she tried, the creature only grew stronger. The reason being, one cannot fight one’s feelings or suppress their emotions. The thing is, one cannot keep itching or fighting their past and the best way to move forward is to accept it and embrace it with open arms. In the film’s ending, Val jumped into the pool, taking Sanshi with her in order to end the creature’s and her own suffering. Underwater, Val once again saw the three corpses cursed by the Sanshi, i.e., Sang, her mother, and her younger self. All these years, Val had suppressed a part of her inner self as a defense mechanism against the painful memories. She couldn’t accept the fact that her own mother tried to kill her. But in the end, Val finally embraced those memories and made peace with her past, therefore freeing the parasite in her head and saving herself from its wrath. The parasite lost its form and wasn’t as monstrous as it was before. As Val’s own fear disappeared, the creature too got diminished in stature and finally disappeared, at least for some time. In the end, Val did see the ants again, suggesting the creature has come back, though like I mentioned earlier, overcoming one’s grief is a lifelong process, and no one’s ever able to completely get rid of their demons. Just with time, they get strong enough to keep them at bay.
