Look Who's Back

David Wnendt's Look Who's Back (2015) adapts Timur Vermes's runaway bestseller, a satire that imagines Adolf Hitler waking up in twenty-first-century Berlin with his memory and convictions intact. A wholly German production, the film became one of the country's biggest domestic hits of its year and drew four nominations for the Deutscher Filmpreis (the Lola) as well as a European Film Award nomination for Best Comedy.

Oliver Masucci is extraordinary as the resurrected dictator, playing him with a deadpan conviction that is by turns hilarious and deeply unsettling. Mistaken by a struggling media industry for a fearless impressionist who never breaks character, he is hustled onto television and into viral fame. Wnendt's masterstroke is to blend scripted comedy with documentary footage: Masucci, in costume, was filmed improvising with real members of the public across Germany, and their unguarded reactions give the film a queasy authenticity no screenplay could manufacture.

What begins as broad farce sharpens into a pointed examination of how a society entertains, normalises and ultimately makes use of a figure it claims to abhor. Critics noted the film's nerve in turning its laughter back on the audience, and its release in a Europe newly anxious about the rise of the far right gave it an uncomfortable topicality. Funny, provocative and quietly alarming, it is a satire that understands the danger in finding the monster amusing.