After his antics and rhetoric are initially taken as preposterous jokes, a clownish anti-immigrant fanatic begins to have an impact on modern society. No, this is not about a certain 2016 U.S. presidential candidate; this is about Adolph Hitler, back from the dead or near-dead as he magically gets transported from his bunker in the waning days of the Second World War to the front lawns of an apartment complex in today’s Germany. This is a strange but interesting satire that could have been much better if not for some issues. First, it starts as a zany comedy and then suddenly becomes a deep social commentary; there’s no smooth transition in between, so it takes some effort to take the characters more seriously in the latter part of the movie. And also, there’s a part of the film where Hitler takes a road trip that feels interminably long, so much so that I was going to stop watching the movie; I only continued because my wife encouraged me to do so. Anything that truly deals with the evil represented by the Nazi movement is bound to make us uncomfortable, as it should, but the movie uses humor to present us with realities that would have been otherwise impossible to tolerate on screen. Even so, it’s a disturbing film. And the guy who plays Hitler—he’s too big and corpulent to be similar to the little runt that Hitler was, but he’s extremely on-target with his acting, playing Adolph not as a raving madman but as a funny, charismatic character who’s capable of projecting an image of patriotic strength that masks his twisted mind; in other words, he’s creepy. A film that reflects much of the xenophobia unfortunately occurring on both sides of the Atlantic today.

Not For Kids
German audio with English sub-titles