Toni Erdmann (2016) Review: A Father's Longest Joke

Is Toni Erdmann worth watching?

Yes. Toni Erdmann is a painfully funny and quietly devastating comedy about a father and daughter who no longer know how to talk to each other, and it contains some of the best screen acting of its decade. Maren Ade builds laughter out of discomfort, letting awkward scenes run until they turn into something tender or absurd. The reservation is obvious from the running time: at 162 minutes, it asks for patience that not every viewer will want to give a comedy.

What is Toni Erdmann about?

Winfried (Peter Simonischek) is a divorced, ageing music teacher in Germany with an unstoppable habit of practical jokes, usually involving a set of cheap false teeth. His daughter Ines (Sandra Hüller) is a management consultant on a high-pressure assignment in Bucharest, a woman whose life has shrunk to presentations, client dinners and phone calls. When Winfried turns up in Romania unannounced, the visit goes badly. Rather than go home, he reinvents himself as “Toni Erdmann”, a bewigged stranger who begins appearing in the middle of her working life with an invented career and a dreadful set of teeth.

Written and directed by Ade, Toni Erdmann is a German production, largely in German with long stretches of the business English Ines speaks at work. It premiered in competition at Cannes in 2016, went on to win Best Film at the European Film Awards and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

Comedy built from silence

Ade does not cut to the punchline. Her comedy lives in pauses, in the second after a joke lands badly, in the polite smile Ines holds while her father embarrasses her in front of a client. The camera stays level and unobtrusive, and scenes play out close to real time, so the audience squirms along with the characters rather than laughing at them from a safe distance.

That approach is also how the film smuggles in its seriousness. The jokes are Winfried’s clumsy way of asking whether his daughter is happy, and the longer the gags go on, the clearer it becomes that he has no other language for the question. Its most celebrated set pieces are best discovered without warning, but they share a pattern: each starts as humiliation and ends as a strange kind of release.

Sandra Hüller and Peter Simonischek in perfect friction

Hüller gives one of the defining performances of modern European cinema. Ines is brittle, competent and guarded, and Hüller lets tiny flickers of exhaustion and resentment show through her professional mask without ever overplaying them. It is a performance about suppression, and it is often very funny precisely because she refuses to let Ines crack.

Simonischek is her ideal opposite. His Winfried is lumbering, sad and stubborn, a man who seems harmless until you notice how deliberately he pushes. The actor never winks at the audience; the wig and the teeth are ridiculous, but the loneliness underneath is played straight. The film’s quiet critique of corporate life, in the jargon of efficiency and outsourcing that fills Ines’s meetings, gains force because these two characters feel so specific.

The cost of all that patience

Not every stretch earns its length. The middle section, heavy with office politics and client manoeuvring, can feel repetitive, and some viewers will tire of waiting for scenes to reach their turn. Ade’s refusal to underline anything is a strength, but it means the emotional payoff arrives slowly and on the film’s own terms. Those expecting a conventional comedy with steady laughs will find the rhythm frustrating.

Who should watch Toni Erdmann?

It suits viewers who love character-driven European cinema, cringe comedy in the tradition of long, unbroken awkwardness, and stories about adult children and their parents. Watch it when you have a full evening and some patience in reserve. There is frank nudity, a sexual scene played for discomfort rather than titillation, some drug use and strong language, so it is firmly an adult film.

Good companions:

• Good Bye, Lenin!, another German comedy-drama in which a family member stages an elaborate performance out of love.
• Head-On, Fatih Akin’s raw German drama, for another portrait of people who hide pain behind outrageous behaviour.
• Further titles on the comedy shelf, where it sits among the genre’s most serious-minded entries.

The verdict

Toni Erdmann is a long, strange and deeply humane film that turns embarrassment into an act of love. Its patience will test some viewers, but Hüller and Simonischek make the journey worth every minute for anyone willing to sit with the silences.

Rating: 4/5