I see that the pro reviewers out there tended to like this film less than everyday audience members, the most common reason being its wildly inconsistent tone. It can veer in an instant from funny to strange to tragic, not just from scene to scene but even within a scene. Obviously this is what director Taika Waititi was trying for -- you can't just come up with that approach by accident -- and admittedly it makes it kind of hard for us viewers to just settle in to a single approach.

But it's still easy to get involved. The central character, 10-year-old Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) is very winning as an innocent, malleable youth trapped deep within a world of Nazi propaganda. His mother Rosie (Scarlett Johanssen) has an explosive secret: she is part of the resistance and moreover is giving sanctuary to a Jewish girl (Thomasin MacKenzie) hiding in their house. Little Jojo doesn't realize either of these things till well along in the plot. In the meantime he has visits from an imaginary friend, Adolf himself (Waititi, in an even weirder role than Korg), who emits consistently strange and contradictory advice that Jojo can't fully act on.

Side characters played by Sam Rockwell, Rebel Wilson, Stephen Merchant, and young Archie Yates help fill in the anti-hate message of the film by acting out the extreme ways hate can manifest itself in a society that was willing to let it happen. All of them are fine -- I just wish that more time could have been spent with Rosie (Jojo's mom), but part of the point is that we see any of the other characters only in the way that young Jojo see them. Kids live in their own world.

It's all gonzo and weird. What genre does this even belong to? Unclassifiable. I don't even know how to assign a numerical rating to it on the IMdB scale. I'd say it's a black comedy but it has too many other elements (including, near the end, a gut-punch as brutal as anything I've seen in the movies). But it also has real warmth (in places), real tragedy (in places), and real pathos.

But the thing is that it's well done. Waititi obviously had in mind to use the end of the Nazi era to make certain statements about human nature. What's the message in the end? I think he gives us that right at the beginning of the credits, in a quote from Rilke: "Let everything happen to you/ Beauty and terror/ Just keep going/ No feeling is final."