Freaks Out (2021)

Gabriele Mainetti's "Freaks Out" arrives as a 2021 Italian historical fantasy in which four circus performers with unconventional powers wander a war-torn Rome while the Reich closes in. The ensemble is assembled with an eye toward bodies that cinema usually relegates to the margins: a young woman who conducts electricity through her skin, a man covered head to toe in hair, an albino who commands insects, and a performer of short stature with a metal-bending gift. Their physical differences are not decoration. They are the engine of the plot, and the film treats their strangeness as the source of whatever heroism it can muster. The camera regards them with affection, and the effect is a quiet argument about who gets to be the protagonist.

Aurora Giovinazzo's Matilde carries the emotional weight. She survives an attempted assault, wrestles with a power she cannot control, and eventually becomes the one who saves everyone. The film frames this as character drama, not as a thesis, which keeps the sermonizing to a minimum. Franz Rogowski's six-fingered Nazi pianist is the counterweight: physically "normal" by conventional measure and monstrous in every other respect. The inversion is deliberate, and it lands. The anti-fascist stakes are unmistakable, though they arrive through pulpy spectacle instead of direct address. Nobody turns to the camera to explain the moral.

Where the film holds back is in the modern vocabulary. Its politics are the politics of 1943 Italy, not of a contemporary culture-war syllabus. There is no environmental thread, no economic critique, and no LGBTQ presence. The disability and body themes are present but embedded in genre mechanics, doing their work through casting and plot instead of commentary. The result is a film that feels progressive in an older, humanist register, and largely indifferent to the categories that dominate current discourse. It is a strange, overlong, genuinely moving piece of pulp, and it earns its sentiment the hard way.