Toni Erdmann Review

Ade's premise sounds like a sketch. A father who cannot stop joking installs a wig and false teeth and inserts himself into his daughter's corporate life in Bucharest. The execution is nothing like a sketch. Patrick Orth shoots in plain handheld light with no comic framing, so every gag has to survive at the pace of real time, and most of them do. Peter Simonischek plays Winfried as a man whose pranks are a symptom rather than a personality, and Sandra Huller gives one of the decade's great performances as a consultant whose job is recommending layoffs she then has to sit with.

Two sequences justify the whole enterprise: an obliged singalong of a Whitney Houston ballad that curdles into an act of aggression, and a birthday brunch that becomes a naked negotiation over dignity. The outsourcing subplot is where the real politics live. At nearly three hours it tests patience by design, and the visual grammar is deliberately unremarkable, which is why we hold the overall at a B while granting that nothing else that year was this specific.