Les maitres fous investigates one African response to colonial oppression. Around 1925 a cult was formed which went by the name of Hauka and whose members were possessed by colonial figures of power. Filmed in Accra, which was at the time the capital of the colonial Gold Coast, Les maitres fous introduces its viewers into the world of Hauka possession ceremonies - a place filled with strange rituals and sometimes shocking practices.

At the request of the Hauka, Rouch attends and films one of their possesion ceremonies. As the film progresses and the men in the cult become possessed, the transformation is dramatic. Once possessed, many of the members of the Hauka cult begin drooling, their bodies in a state of paroxysm; some even parade through the compound while burning their own flesh, as proof of the fact that they are no longer human. The apex of the ceremony happens when the Hauka spirits sacrifice and then eat a dog.

Not contenting himself with the exoticism of the ceremony, Rouch looks for an explanation for these behaviors. The film goes on to show the Hauka men in their daily lives. They are seemingly well-adjusted men. Rouch proposes that perhaps what these men have found in the Hauka cult is a necessary form of catharsis; a means through which they are able to purge themselves of the resentment towards the colonial powers that be. Perhaps, proposes Rouch, this Hauka "madness" is what keeps them sane (something which cannot always be said of their colonial counterparts). Rouch eventually came to repudiate this conclusion , finding it far too psychoanalytic to be accurate.

Les maitres fous touches something primordial in its viewers. Its images frighten and mystify. Much like the first time one reads Nietzsche or Antonin Artaud, one feels the pull of the Dionysian spirit (the spirit which Nietzsche believed was incarnated in Greek tragedies and which Artaud found in Balinese theater). One also feels the unique and discerning aesthetic of a young filmmaker who was looking for a way to change the way people envisioned colonial Africa.

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