This resembles the crazed love child of ’Allo ’Allo! and Suite Française; it’s actually adapted from the 2003 novel The Kaiser’s Last Kiss by Alan Judd. We are in occupied Holland in 1940, where the abdicated German Kaiser is now living – played with much bewhiskered grumpiness by Christopher Plummer. Janet McTeer plays the prickly empress. With the Nazis now in charge, a decent Wehrmacht officer is put in charge of the Kaiser’s security, and this is Captain Stefan Brandt, played by Jai Courtney, who soon cops a couple of super-raunchy love scenes with the Kaiser’s comely Dutch maidservant Mieke, in which role Lily James talks about “sherving the Kaissher” in a Steve McClaren Dutch accent.

It all comes to a head when Heinrich Himmler (Eddie Marsan) comes to dinner, amid feverish rumour that the Nazis may be willing to restore the Kaiser’s (notional) rule in Berlin. The title refers to Captain Brandt, that hunky yet sensitive good German: an exception to the Nazi rule of beastliness. But the movie’s covert ideological rhetoric is to suggest that the Kaiser himself is the exception: a man with reactionary views on Jews, communists, Freemasons etc but basically adorable and loads better than Hitler. (Really? The film doesn’t allude to his famous remark from 1919, that Jews were a “nuisance that humanity must get rid of … I believe the best thing would be gas!”) The ridiculousness levels are very high.