I knew going into this that it was a Nazi satire, so what surprised me was the immense emotional core that held this film together. To jump straight to the end: that final moment – when Jojo and Elsa leave the house, and take in their liberated city, and begin to slowly dance with each other – is one of the most cathartic I have seen in years, and the moment that has stuck with me ever since the film. It is to the film’s immense credit that it can balance the comedy of an imaginary Hitler with the powerful, simple humanity of dancing.

The film is rooted in a couple of tremendous performances. Scarlett Johansson is a standout as Rosie, a rebel with a wonderfully human love for the world around her, summed up in dancing she encourages Jojo to participate in. Dancing, for her, is freedom of expression, liberation – a far cry from the censorious and regimented Nazi Germany. Jojo – a superb performance by Roman Griffin Davis – rejects this ideology, still enamoured with the Party and its propaganda. The film, then, is Jojo’s journey from blind ideologue to open-minded child. The Nazis have robbed these children of their childhood, radicalising and militarising them and turning them in to spies against their own families. So to regress back to just being a child – free, dancing – is a victory.

And how does he eventually come to reject that ideology (or, more prosaically, tell Hitler to ‘fuck off’)? Love. Proximity to a real Jew, Elsa, someone he sees is kind and clever and fierce and all those things that make up humanity. Simply interacting with a member of the hated, propagandised race is enough to dispel that propaganda. That’s a message that will probably be relevant forever, but it’s certainly applicable to today.

The film kicks in to fifth gear once Rosie is hanged. This was a satisfying twist – unexpected and yet inevitable, the logical conclusion of all the pieces the film had been feeding us. Jojo loses his protection and his direction, thrust into the unknown. The scene with Stephen Merchant’s Gestapo is unbearably tense, reminiscent of that elongated opening to Inglorious Basterds – a faux-polite evildoer who can be polite precisely because he knows he has all the power. Elsa’s deception is covered for by Captain Klenzendorf, who indulges in a small moment of common humanity that makes all the difference. His later covering for Jojo – denouncing him as a Jew in front of Soviet soldiers, probably saving his life – is a gut-punch, a reminder that in this brutal world good deeds went punished. But it’s the existence of those good deeds – enacted by people like Rosie, Klenzendorf, Jojo – that reminds us that even in the darkest hour, there is always hope, and always dancing.