Ines works for a management consulting firm in Bucharest; she has no family, no boyfriend, and her sole aim is to climb the career ladder, keeping her life under strict control.

At least, that's what she believed.

She believed it until one day her father showed up at her door.

A brief, surprise visit that soon plunges Ines's life into inescapable chaos.

And that's because her father has a feeling that Ines isn't as happy behind her façade as a rising manager.

And so he dons a wildly styled wig, horrific fake teeth, and transforms into "Toni Erdmann," a bizarre being halfway between the grotesque and the wild.

Toni Erdmann introduces himself to Ines's colleagues and superiors as a diplomat, a member of the social elite, and an expert financial consultant.

Each of his appearances upsets Ines and gradually shatters her fierce pragmatism.

Maren Ade's Toni Erdmann lightly and ironically combines a bizarre sentiment that pervades every cell of the film with a world permeated by mechanism and coldness, returning to the viewer a suspended and indecipherable atmosphere where every certainty crumbles.

Ines's world is a reality where connections are everything, and the empty dialectic between the protagonists does not allow for an honest discussion of their feelings.

Ines's father bursts into this world like a bull in a china shop, cynically pure and cold in his systematic work of destruction.

Despite all the hilarity that arises from these conflicts, the film also thrives on quiet and melancholic moments, intensely portrayed by Sandra Hüller and Peter Simonischek, who manage to shape the delicate alchemy of the father-daughter relationship.

The viewer immediately becomes part of this fragile relationship and is totally immersed in it.

Peter Simonischek is fantastic in the lead role, managing the precarious balance between the alter ego Toni—wildly confused and often excessively annoying and irreverent—and his true self: a concerned father who wants his daughter to be freed from the cage of "corporate replicants," to use a quote from Chris Columbus.

And Sandra Hüller demonstrates her class as an actress by subtly portraying the inner conflict of a woman between trained toughness and inner fragility.

All of this emerges in its dazzling splendor in one of the film's key scenes, in which a Whitney Houston song lyric reveals everything this woman cannot say aloud.

And so the icy Ines melts and belts out the lyrics that reveal her intimate essence: “I believe the children are our future.
Show them all the beauty they have within.
Everyone is looking for a hero. People need someone to look up to.
I never found anyone who fulfilled my needs.
So I learned to rely only on myself.
I decided long ago never to remain in anyone's shadow.
If I fail, if I succeed, at least I live as I believe.
No matter what they demand from me, they cannot take away my dignity because the greatest love of all, I am living it.
I found the greatest love of all, which is within me.
The greatest love of all is easy to obtain by learning to love yourself.” The dialogues are authentically realistic, the humor is dark, sharp, revealing, especially the portrayal of the harsh and superficial business world, which is literally raw and unapologetic.

A persistent narrative tension hovers over the story, also thanks to the excellent Steadicam work by Patrick Orth, the director of photography.

The camera hardly ever leaves the faces; it is close to them, capturing uncomfortable moments and throwing the viewer into those shifting postures.

Toni Erdmann is a film that masterfully maintains the emotional thread of the narrative and beautifully balances its comic and tragic force.

It is a work that strikes with the iconographic force of a dream: as evidenced by one of the final scenes in which Toni, disguised as an enormous Bulgarian Kukeri (a type of imposing, hairy creature intended to ward off evil spirits), appears at Ines's birthday brunch where, by the hostess's choice, the guests are completely nude.

A surreal scene concluding with Ines chasing the Kukeri as it leaves the party.

The two meet again in a park and share a long, paternal hug—a memorable scene for a film we neither can nor want to forget.