Toni Erdman Writer-director Maren Ade’s stun gun of a comedy-drama is a bizarre, brilliant, and madly original story about an aging German hippie man-child and amateur comedian who pulls every trick in his book to reconnect with his estranged yuppie daughter , who works in Romania as a corporate consultant hired by struggling companies to lay off workers by the hundreds. He’s retired and lonely, so he pops up in her life unannounced – and in disguise as a life coach to CEOs.