My Wonderful Wanda

A film called My Wonderful Wanda needed more exploration of the title character.

Death and new life, cultural prejudices and that Swiss obsession with money play into a film that is Germanic in its darkness, as subtle as a wet slap and funny? Eventually.

It’s an engaging, mostly well-acted tale, full of surprising twists, even if some seem a bit too on the nose.

An engrossing but uneven comedy-drama.

Bettina Oberli is more interested in the interplay of her characters than a barbed look at geopolitics, an approach that clicks only to a point in this well-performed but overlong and uneven feature.

The film, written by Oberli and Cooky Ziesche, satirizes class divides and xenophobia (“the Pole” constantly carries a derogatory connotation here), but never takes the satire far enough to be memorable, challenging or anything beyond whimsical.

Oberli and Ziesche, who’ve divided the story into three chapters plus an epilogue (the less said about the plot the better to protect a few solid twists), attempt to lay bare the thorny issue of outsourcing care work to migrants but don’t layer in enough heft or context to make a wholly satisfying statement.