MY NEIGHBOUR ADOLF: Uneven And Tonally Unsure

Leon Prudovsky‘s premise in My Neighbour Adolf is an intriguing one, something that promises a tragi-comic tale wrought with both sentimentality and black humour. In Columbia, 1960, Polish Holocaust survivor Malek Polsky (David Heyman) is living out his days in isolation, tending to the black roses his wife loved – as evidenced in a opening sequence featuring Polsky’s entire family enjoying a picnic before the inevitable war comes which will rend them completely – and generally acting like a disaffected misanthrope, which you feel he is entitled to given what he’s been through.

Herr Herzog

Everything changes, however, when an old German man, Herman Herzog (Udo Kier) moves in next door and claims the territory on which Polsky’s black roses grow. Polsky is upset, of course, but not just because of the roses. Polsky, you see, is a world chess champion, and sat across from a certain German Führer during a match in Berlin. He knows those “dead blue eyes”. That stare. To add to his suspicions, Herr Herzog claims a German Shepherd as a pet – who manages to break into Polsky’s garden and ruin his roses – and takes up painting in his garden. He is attended by a secretive German lawyer (Olivia Silhavy), and a group of young men. Polsky watches all this with the growing suspicion that his neighbour is, in fact, Adolf Hitler. Consensus has that Hitler died in a bunker in 1946 but, as Polsky argues with a Columbian law officer he beseeches, his body was recovered by the Russians who never released any evidence of it.

And so it falls to Polsky to deliver proof that his neighbour is indeed one of the most notorious men in history. This he attempts through a series of “comical” surveillance procedures and attempts at subterfuge. At one point he breaks out the chess board and offers his neighbour a game, resulting in a staid cat-and-mouse chase full of guesswork and suppositions. It never quite comes off in the way Prudovsky expects, however, with a jarring tone hinting at a movie that can’t decide what it wants to be. There are genuine moments of earnestness, such as Polsky’s story of his time in a concentration camp, but these are followed swiftly by Polsky trying – and failing, given his age – to urinate on Herzog’s car, and attempting to discovered whether his neighbour has only one testicle. It wades into slapstick territory that its subject matter can’t sustain and so often feels like a letdown.

Legends

The talent is there – David Heyman and Udo Kier are both legends in their own right. The Scottish actor does a good job of belligerent stoicism-meets-wounded-psyche, even if his Polsky is saddled with ridiculous moments which undermine his plight. Elsewhere, you feel Kier must be getting bored of this by now. One wonders if it might be considered a blight upon German actors that they be one day called upon to portray the most reviled man in history, a shadow over their entire country.

Yet Kier has done this not once but twice before, most recently in the Amazon Prime series Hunters. Of course, there is more to this role than meets the eye, and Kier‘s eyes – far from being dead – are soulful and deep, suggesting something else is at play here. When the third act reveal does come, neither man can save the deflation that occurs now the mystery is solved. From then on My Neighbour Adolf plods to a half-hearted finish, leaning heavily on the sentimentality of two old men grappling with the past. It doesn’t feel earned enough to be satisfying, and in fact comes across a little condescending.

Conclusion:

My Neighbour Adolf had within its DNA the potential for something good, but alas an inability to strike a consistent tone means the talents of David Heyman and Udo Kier and unfortunately squandered. Fans of this particular sub-genre might be better of with the likes of The Boys From Brazil, Marathon Man, or Apt Pupil instead.

My Neighbour Adolf is another addition to the Nazi mystery subgenre. Which is your favourite? Let us know in the comments!

My Neighbour Adolf is screening now in the UK.

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