Freaks vs the Reich: a ludicrous circus fantasy filled with lavishly orchestrated carnage

Films that intermingle the events and details of World War II with fantastical imaginings inevitably stray into questionable terrain. And yet, the risk of trivialising the era’s real-life horrors is not so daunting to the many filmmakers who believe there’s an endless appetite for the sight of Nazi soldiers getting blown to pieces.

With Freaks vs the Reich – which premiered under the English title of Freaks Out at the Venice festival in 2021 – director Gabriele Mainetti obliges with several satisfactorily grisly set pieces. They punctuate his tale of four super-powered circus performers – the insect-controlling Cencio (Pietro Castellitto), the ‘man-beast’ Fulvio (Claudio Santamaria), the magnetic Mario (Giancarlo Martini) and the electrically charged Matilde (Aurora Giovinazzo) – who are eagerly sought by Franz (Franz Rogowski), a sadistic, six-fingered seer who believes they could be a deciding factor in the war’s outcome.

In spite of its own bloodlust, Mainetti’s film shares less with payback fantasies like Inglourious Basterds (2009) and Sisu (2022) than it does with A Very Long Engagement (2004), Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s World War I set-effort to situate whimsical magic realism and earnest sentimentality alongside lavishly orchestrated carnage. The circus theme and broad, bawdy Italian humour add a Felliniesque flavour, though when a character refers to our heroes as the ‘fantastic four’ it underlines that the material is essentially a comic-book fable about a group of misfits who must realise their collective potential if they hope to survive the wrath of a world-threatening baddie. Thankfully, the film’s energy is usually enough to compensate for lapses into incoherence and bathos, though some viewers may feel less forgiving of scenes of Jewish civilians being packed into trains and the attempted rape of Matilde by German soldiers.

As much as the production design may share with the films of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Marc Caro and Guillermo del Toro, Freaks vs the Reich still has its own vivid and peculiar details, especially amid the queasy opulence and steampunk menace of the villain’s circus lair. As charismatic here as in Ira Sachs’s recent Passages, Rogowski lends an undercurrent of wounded poignancy to Franz, himself an outcast due to the additional finger that makes him such a proficient pianist. In one clever touch, his repertoire includes songs by Radiohead and Guns N’ Roses, Franz having plundered their melodies from his premonitions.

But even Rogowski’s gusto has nearly been exhausted before the final fiery conflagration, Mainetti having stuffed his film with too much of everything. Then again, when it comes to making action-fantasy spectaculars full of circus freaks and Nazi occultists, there’s no reward for restraint.

 ► Freaks vs the Reich is in UK cinemas from 12 January.