We Are The Freaks

A trio of gawky teens are our heroes in ‘We Are the Freaks’, which mostly takes place over one night in Birmingham in 1990. Margaret Thatcher has recently resigned and Britain seems ready to party. Jack (Jamie Blackley) is arch guide and narrator, introducing us to his shambolic friends, hapless young Conservative Parsons (Mike Bailey) and anarchic kohl-pencilled rich kid Chunks (Sean Teale). The plot, such as it is, revolves around their attempts to navigate the disparate expectations of parents, love interests and an extremely strange younger brother type with whom they are unexpectedly saddled. The strength of ‘We Are the Freaks’ is that it never feels like a cookie-cutter teen movie. It is, as the title suggests, an oddity – not always accomplished but with a raw energy that allows its lack of polish and occasional tonal missteps to come over as endearing. If you imagine the result of taking an early draft of an ‘Inbetweeners’ script and turning it over to some filmmakers without worrying too much about rewrites, you won’t be far off.