IMPOSTOR with appalling teeth: Meet Toni Erdmann (Peter Simonischek).

WHAT DO YOU do when your hot-shot entrepreneurial daughter who is earnestly climbing the corporate ladder in Europe freezes you out of her life? Do you do the social thing and try to wine and dine her and buy her gifts, or do you go all out to worm your way into her confidence, using every trick in the book and inventing some brand new tricks, yourself?

Winfried Conradi (Peter Simonischek) is a man with an ill-fitting denture. He’s a music teacher and the owner of an extremely elderly dog. And eccentricity is the tune by which he conjures his life. Only it’s such deadpan eccentricity that it takes you a while to get attuned to it. But once you do, the rhythm and resonance of this work will soar with you and haunt you. Further to that, it might well make you wake up in the night laughing and sobbing at some of the work’s nuances, weeks after you’ve seen it.

Winfried’s daughter, Ines (Sandra Hüller) fits into the millennial German stereotype graciously. She’s an A-type personality tightly controlling her frenetic Bucharest-based life, complete as it is with the obsessive pressure of wining and dining important people, juggling technology and time. Her dad’s curious as to where and how she lets her hair down. And with whom. But nay, Ines, with her tight business suit and her every-hair-in-place German precision wants nothing of the presence of her awkward, emotional, curious daddy-o.

Bordering on the kind of manipulative cruelty you see in films such as Joseph Mankiewicz’s (1972) Sleuth, with Michael Caine and Lawrence Olivier, Toni Erdmann reveals really bizarre antics of Winfried to gain his daughter’s attention and win her affection but also a place in her life.

It takes an infected toenail, a spontaneously naked birthday party, an alarming cheese grater, not to mention an unbelievably enormous Bulgarian cultural costume, sex with a green petit four and an invented character called Toni Erdmann, too ugly and socially awkward to believe possible. Almost clocking in at three hours, this is a long film, but it will keep you riveted as it keeps you surprised. Shortlisted for the best foreign film in 2017’s Oscars and with a slew of nominations and awards in its wake, it’s a wild story punctuated with hairpin bends in its plot, but it is its superb craftsmanship, incredibly fine performances and sophisticated storytelling that will grip you the most.

Ultimately, it’s a beautiful paean about the complicated relationship between a man and his adult daughter, replete with all its irritating and uncomfortable moments that any grown woman with an elderly father will relate to.

• Toni Erdmann (2016) is directed by Maren Ade and stars Sandra Hüller, Peter Simonischek and Michael Wittenborn. It is 162 minutes in length and is in German with English subtitles. It is being screened as part of the European Film Festival in Johannesburg on May 7 and 13 at Cinema Nouveau in Rosebank, Pretoria on May 7 and 14 at Cinema Nouveau in Brooklyn, Cape Town on May 7 and 13 at Cinema Nouveau at the V&A and Durban on May 14 at Cinema Nouveau, Gateway. Visit eurofilmfest.co.za and www.cinemanouveau.co.za for more details.