I'm not sure why this film is considered a comedy. It is a tragedy. It is a slow unraveling of anything approaching happiness at the end of the title character's life.

The jokes never come in this film. If you laugh at anything in it you are some kind of monster.

Watching the shuffling, self-loathing main character never achieve any form of redemption as he attempts to force his daughter to see her life as miserable (as he does) is painful. It's the sort of thing that has justified children abandoning their parents for forever.

Toni Erdmann is a long-running take on shame and shame-culture; there is little worth recommending in it. I watched it to the end just to see if the filmmakers would take the obvious, oblique, and predictable way out to its conclusion and they do. The damn film is sad. If this is German comedy (which we know it isn't) then something really has died over there.