Jojo Rabbit is as strange and suspicious as its playful title. It looks like a children’s movie, but it is not at all, and it’s hardly for adults too. Although it is, for both. The language of Taika Waititi is a bit of a mess in search of an author that, courting Chaplin, Wes Anderson and Roberto Benigni, alternates a slightly dated comedy—at times funny, other priestly—with unexpectedly romantic moments, some of which a little cheesy, some genuinely touching.

For all that it is not, and its garish sense of wrong, Jojo Rabbit is in its own undefinable way a rather witty and profound film. Not least among its merits, that of recovering the formidable German version of David Bowie’s Hero, and entrusting its candid soul to the verses of Rainer Maria Rilke.

‘Let everything happen to you, beauty and terror.
Just keep going, no feeling is final.’