The 'Some Freaks' Trailer Sees One Woman Choose Herself Over Romance

Raise your hand if you've ever been young and felt like you didn't fit in. That's pretty much all of us, right? Well, the Some Freaks trailer captures that high school misfit feeling. The film centers on a trio of friends, who are arguably misfits in their school because their problems are visible to the outside world. Matt's eyepatch earns him the nickname "Cyclops" at school, while Jill is made fun of for being plus-sized. Then Matt and Jill find each other and friendship turns into something more. Happily ever after, right? Wrong. When Jill gets a great college offer, she ends up relocating far enough away to warrant a plane ride. Which is a pretty empowering twist.

If you're looking for a frame of reference, it's a little like The Perks Of Being A Wallflower, except that the script for Some Freaks was an original piece, whereas the more famous film was adapted from a book. But Some Freaks, which hits theaters and VOD August 4, isn't about an intense first love that's thwarted by circumstance. This is about a woman choosing her academic life over her romantic destiny.

It's even more intriguing since this is a woman who is presented to us as being on the margins of high school life (as shown in the moment where that other girl gets hostile when they bump into each other in the hall). But instead of clinging to her boyfriend like a life raft or using him as a prop for her self-confidence, Jill opts to start over on her own.

Whether or not you think this is the right thing to do (and given that she is opting for what sounds like her first choice college over a boy in her new home town, I kind of do), some of the closing dialogue in the trailer seems to support that choice. When Matt comes to visit her at college and discovers she's changed her hair and lost a couple of pounds, he reacts as if she's betrayed him. What he says is pretty unforgivable: "I liked that the only guys I was competing against were old men and degenerates and you shouldn't be able to change all that without telling me." This, to me, is the nail in the coffin.

It suggests that, despite the indie rom-com stylings of the first half of the trailer, Matt and Jill's love isn't some pure, noble thing, but was (at least in part) about an insecure boy opting for someone that he felt he wouldn't have much competition for. And if that isn't a cautionary tale that has you exchanging holding hands with your prom date for tenderly leafing through the pages of Moby Dick at the NYU library, I don't know what is.

Boys are cool, but books are forever. It took me a few hundred years to figure that out, but Jill is clearly a better role model than I, because she's already got that into her head as a high school student.