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Toni Erdmann review: Father-daughter tale a litmus test for your sense of humour

Craig Mathieson

★★★★
M, 162 minutes

Winfried Conradi (Peter Simonischek) shuffles through life. The ageing German music teacher and inveterate prankster's act is more about deadpan confusion than inclusive humour. Like so much of writer-director Maren Ade's quietly unique film – a hit at the Cannes Film Festival and nominated for best foreign language film at the Academy Awards – the oversized Winfried contains multiple sides forever out of balance.

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A practical joking father tries to reconnect with his hard working daughter by creating an outrageous alter ego and posing as her CEO's life coach.

He's perverse and regretful, the movie is funny and sad.

Stripped of a steadying score and explanatory monologues – so much is left unsaid in Toni Erdmann that the absence starts to say something – this story of a father and daughter's bond can be a litmus test for your sense of humour. I found it intermittently funny, others have had an uproarious experience, but it doesn't particularly matter. Wherever the humour ends, a tender unease takes hold, making for compelling viewing.

Having briefly dodged Winfried on a visit home, his corporate consultant daughter, Ines (Sandra Huller), is surprised by him at her Romanian workplace. "I've really invaded you here," he says, both triumphant and apologetic, and Ines shoots down his gags, which generally begin with Winfried putting in a pair of joke teeth that give Simonischek the scariest face of a German actor since Klaus Kinski. The divide between the two is obviously and painfully deep.

Toni Erdmann runs for an epic 162 minutes, long enough to capture everything buried between Ines and Winfried, especially once the latter puts those teeth in and declares himself Toni Erdmann, a business performance coach who turns up wherever Ines is, as if he's her long-lost conscience. Shaken but stirred, she plays along, first out of anger and then comfort at his act of imposition.

Ines wants to show Winfried-Toni the realities of her career, which is a grim slog against the casual misogyny of her latest client, Henneberg (Michael Wittenborn), and the looming retrenchment of several hundred Romanian oil workers. A preposterous male imposter such as Toni fits into this world more easily than a capable woman, and the long, attentive takes reveal what is a knockout performance by Huller that captures both Ines' resilience and the flaws she has tried to deny.

As the movie takes prickly shape, you pick up on its cues: often it's illuminative to pay attention to the body language and emotional reaction of whoever is not speaking. An easy resolution never eventuates, nor is the tone a form of guidance. Even when Ines belts out a Whitney Houston song at a gathering, the scene is full of conflicting emotion.

Toni Erdmann is a fake, but Toni Erdmann is all too real.