Soundtracking: Toni Erdmann
by Chris Feil
Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann is one of the decade’s most exacting looks at depression and the human cost of the global corporate mindset. These two thematic points of view ebb and flow in and out of one another in the film as suddenly as the film’s comedy and tragedy do, showing the malaise of how we live today that’s symptomatic of impersonal capitalistic remove. It’s a state of being that is symbiotically personal and societal, desperately funny and deeply sad.