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Wendy (Cornelia Gröschel) finally wants to be promoted, so she promotes her boss first
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Netflix
It's not looking good for Wendy.
Unpaid bills are piled up on the kitchen table of their terraced house, leaves gather instead of water in the garden pool, and their son needs new shoes again.
But when Wendy - blond curly hair, deep rims under her eyes - finally scrapes up her courage and the manager of the diner where she works asks for a promotion, she is cast off.
That's how it always happens to her.
Wendy (Cornelia Gröschel) stumbles through the dreariness of the suburbs and through her life.
That only changes when she discovers her superpower.
Wooden dialogues, predictable plot
Super power?
Exactly.
"Freaks - You are one of us" is changing from the ARD Wednesday drama to a superhero film, at least that's what the makers of this new German Netflix production had hoped for.
Director Felix Binder and screenwriter Marc O. Seng developed the idea for this a few years ago.
During the lunch break while writing the ZDF satire "Lerchenberg" they came up with the idea of making a realistic superhero film, according to the press release.
But that's where they fail.
Because there is little realistic about this film.
Not the wooden dialogues that you have heard so similar and better in various Marvel films.
Not the predictable plot.
Not even Wendy's snack bar, which is more reminiscent of an Edward Hopper painting than a Frankfurt sausage stand, catches the German suburb.
Claudia Gröschel, who really tries hard to get a little adrenaline into the veins of the bloodless protagonist Wendy, cannot change that either.
In fact, she only wakes up from her everyday coma when the homeless Marek (Wotan Wilke Möhring) makes her flush her pills into the toilet, which a mysterious psychiatrist (Nina Kunzendorf) has prescribed for her since childhood.
The pills, Wendy noticed after a few hours, never lightened her mood, but rather dampened her supernatural ability: Wendy's damn strong - so strong that she could push a couple of trucks without breaking a sweat.
This of course confronts them with a problem that many mothers are familiar with: the compatibility of work, family and super power.
But because "Freaks" is supposed to be a realistic superhero film, you don't see much of it.
Sure, Wendy's fist stuck in an ATM to pay off her debts.
And of course, she will shoot a soccer ball in the clouds when she is kicking with her son.
But the viewer feels cheated about the best part of being a superhero (superpower!).
You only get to see a little more of this when work colleague Elmar (Tim Oliver Schultz) also senses a talent (quite a coincidence, by the way) - and after years of being an outsider, he now feels determined to achieve greater things.
We know how that can end from pretty much every other superhero film.
What a shame that Felix Binder and Marc O. Seng couldn't think of anything new.
Unique partners included
It's also a shame because the two of them and the producer team Maren Lüthje and Florian Schneider had two unusual partners with them that were unique in this constellation with Netflix and the small television game from ZDF.
The ZDF editorial team was initially irritated by telling the social drama of the poverty-threatened mother with a superhero approach, according to a statement from the producers.
But then the little television game took part.
"Freaks" could have been a courageous art-house film that finally scratched the mainstream quality of superhero cinema after two dozen revamped Marvel epics.
Instead, the film turns out to be neither a sensitive drama with superhero action nor a blockbuster with complex characters.
But as a German "X-Men" copy with less good effects.
With the German Netflix hit "Dark", which Seng wrote on, or with the popular hospital series "Club der Roten Bänder", Binder and Seng have shown how much they care about serial storytelling.
It's a shame that they didn't have the opportunity to do so with "Freaks".
Not every material has to be wrung out as a series, but this could have done more time for the characters and their conflicts.
Perhaps then "Freaks" would really have become a realistic superhero story.
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