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The stunning rise of the superhero movie as a blockbuster has also had an unexpected, but pleasant, side effect. The indie superpowers film – because few of them deal with what the MCU and DC’s risible offerings define as an orthodox ‘superhero’ – has become a sub-genre of its own and, what’s more, the most interesting takes on the subject are coming from outside the US.

Freaks, subtitled You Are One of Us to differentiate it from the 1932 Tod Browning masterpiece, is a German film that debuted on Netflix in September 2020. The freaks of the title are individuals with latent superpowers, which have been repressed by drugs under the lie of them suffering from mental illness. Those freaks unable to live a normal life through pharmaceuticals are imprisoned and sedated in a psychiatric hospital.

Cornelia Gröschel is superb as Wendy, a fast food waitress who has built a life with a husband and son after an incident when she was a child, taking two little blue pills every morning. When she is approached by Marek, a bum scavenging for food in the restaurant’s dumpsters, she discovers that the pills are doing something more than she expected and stops taking them…

TV director Felix Binder makes his feature film debut with Freaks; it’s an assured piece, well-paced and with pleasing dollops of pathos and humour throughout, and as with many Netflix originals, you could see yourself watching a series featuring these characters. The increasing availability of foreign film due to Netflix’s international business plan is another welcome side-effect of the change in the movie business over the past decade, and long may it continue if it brings us more like Freaks.