Jojo Rabbit is a shining example to me of the magic of what film can do. The fact that you can take something as awful as World War II was and make an outrageous concept out of it is nothing short of amazing to me, but that’s what movies can achieve. They can allow us to laugh at something that was truly horrible, and can tell us stories utilizing these concepts in order to create something unique.

This is one of the weirdest coming-of-age stories you’ll ever see. We follow Jojo, who is a 10-year-old boy growing up in Germany towards the end of World War II. He idolizes Hitler, to the point where he sees him as his imaginary friend, and has conversations with him in this way to help guide him along in his life. Jojo’s whole worldview starts to be challenged when he discovers that his mom is hiding a Jew in their attic. Torn between his mother and his imaginary friend Hitler, Jojo must learn to reconcile how to live with a monstrous Jew, as well as how his identity is going to be affected growing up in a world where, spoiler alert: the Germans are losing the war.

Jojo Rabbit is actually a hard movie to review, though, because I feel like nothing else I say about the movie is going to sell you on it anymore than the concept alone should. I can go on about how the performances are great or how the comedy is hilarious, but none of that compares to just the knowledge that we have a movie about a little kid whose imaginary friend is Hitler. I mean, come on, if that isn’t enough to sell you on the movie, then I don’t think anything else can.

Another reason I will say that this is hard to review, though, is that I don’t have anything bad to say about the movie, and yet I just don’t feel like it quite deserves a higher score than I’m giving it. That always feels like a cheap answer to me, but sometimes movies just strike you really hard, and other times they don’t. This movie was the latter for me. I enjoyed the hell out of it, but I also never really felt blown away for some reason. I have nothing but positive things to say about it, though, so I also wouldn’t blame anyone else for giving it an even higher score than me. Either way, even though I don’t have a ton to actually say about the movie, I still think it’s definitely worth checking out, even if just to support movies that have wild concepts like this. It’s certainly one of the more unique movies I’ve seen in a while, and so I think it deserves to be seen.

4/5