Waititi, between directing two instalments of the MCU Thor franchise, takes a step to the side to cover the Nazi era from a skew-whiff angle, with a ten-year-old member of the Hitler Youth, who has Adolf himself as his imaginary friend, finding out that his mother has been hiding a Jewish girl in their house. This causes no end of self-questioning in the callow lad, and he ends up reversing his untested views.
Superficially, this is the same set-up as in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, but the emphasis is much more, as you would expect from essentially a director of comedies, on breaking down the grotesque absurdity of the times through ridicule rather than earnest, explicit outrage. It may thus seem frivolous, but there's such an abundance of serious, weighty cinema about the topic that there is still room for an attack on the sheer concept of Nazism done just through jokes, with Waititi himself playing the imaginary Hitler as an utter buffoon. Laughing at the enemy does not mean making light of their crimes, no matter what po-faced critics of this approach would insist.
6/10
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