How Holocaust-era film The Shop on the High Street frames fascism

A surreal happy ending and a final tragic one coexist in The Shop on the High Street, which benefits from intellectual honesty and thoughtfully edited frames

I have finally met a Taika Waititi film I didn’t like. A lot is unsettling about the intense cutesification of Nazism in his latest, Jojo Rabbit, about a 10-year-old German boy who is entranced by Hitler’s hateful ideology until friendship with a Jewish girl makes him question it during the last years of World War II. The parts of the film which attempt to be irreverent don’t sit convincingly with the parts that attempt to be profound. They are vaguely held together by Rilke quotes and formularised montages set to German versions of classic hits, making for glib satire and