Freaks: You’re One of Us

  • 12 Sep - 18 Sep, 2020
  • Mag The Weekly
  • TV TIME

German Netflix movie Freaks: You’re One of Us hopes to find itself into the ever-crowded superhero sweepstakes. Felix Binder directs a modestly budgeted comic-bookish maybe-would-be saga that might just offer a slightly different riff on a pervasive genre. A school is in shambles. A desk sits smashed on a sidewalk, splattered with blood. A massive hole has been blasted in a concrete wall. A girl sits alone inside, crying, listening to music on headphones. An official-looking woman walks up to her. Decades later, that young girl is now a passive adult, Wendy (Cornelia Groschel). She furrows her brow at an eviction notice, says goodbye to her security-guard husband Lars (Frederic Linkemann) and young son Karl (Finnlay Berger), and then heads to work at Chop Heaven, a fast-food joint. Freaks: You’re One of Us begs comparison to almost any superhero movie that has the crass audaciousness not to be a ubiquitous multi-billion-dollar franchise. The movie fails to show anything new. It builds to a phlegmatic, uninspired and hastily rendered climax where you think you know what’s going to happen, but what ultimately happens is much less exciting, and maybe seems like a budgetary consideration. And there we sit, vaguely unsatisfied. The film just generally lacks the creative inspiration to use its limitations to its advantage.

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