What better way to start the new year with what will surely be remembered as one of its worst films. This mashup of magical realism, gratuitous violence and sentimentality is an atrocity in filmic form. It’s only a bit offensive for its appropriation of the Holocaust as a dramatic engine. What really stirs revulsion is the film’s smug delusions of quality, a self-belief so strong that it has the gall to take two hours and 21 minutes to unfurl itself to the end. Everyone who whined about Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon being too long should be strapped to a chair, like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, and forced to watch this in order to understand the difference between a film that’s long because it has a lot to say and one that actively seeks to make its viewers stupider after watching it.
So here’s the plot. The year is 1943 and the small Mezza Piotta circus has set up in Rome. Run by kindly impresario Israel (Giorgio Tirabassi), the circus stars are an assortment of so-called freaks, a quartet with X-Men/Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children/Angela Carter-like abilities. Cencio (Pietro Castellitto) can control insects with his mind, although he has issues with bees. Mario (Giancarlo Martini) is a clown human magnet. Fulvio (Claudio Santamaria) is covered in hair like a cheap Chewbacca costume but has superhuman strength. Finally, ingenue Matilde (Aurora Giovinazzo) is so full of electricity that she shocks anyone who touches her – except when she doesn’t because the script is terminally lazy. When Israel is hauled away east to the death camps and the gang are separated, Matilde embarks on a picaresque adventure to find them all.
Meanwhile, there is a Nazi circus ringmaster in town named Franz (Franz Rogowski) who likes to huff ether because it gives him visions of the future (don’t try this at home, kids); he also has extra pinkies on each hand which enables him to play Creep by Radiohead very fast on the piano. Franz wants to capture the players from the Mezza Piotta who he’s seen in his visions and do mean stuff to them – it’s not exactly clear what his goal is.
Rogowski has been showered with praise for his performances of late, especially as a polyamorous narcissist in Passages, but any awards bodies thinking of bestowing prizes on him may wish to reconsider if they see his silly mugging and gurning in this, leaping about antically like a labradoodle chasing a Chuckit! ball. Sidenote: it’s also offensive the way this Italian film pushes the entirety of the blame for Jewish persecution on to the Germans, as if Mussolini and the 1938 racial laws didn’t even exist, and posits that all Italians are nice and it’s just those beastly Teutons from up north who did everything. Somehow you can imagine it’s the kind of idea current prime minister Giorgia Meloni would like.
• Freaks vs the Reich is released on 12 January in UK and Irish cinemas.
