Annoying Neighbor

1 star

A good mystery keeps you on the edge of your seat, trying to figure out whodunnit. A bad mystery has you lying back, thinking of everything but the solution, wondering when it’s all going to end.

My Neighbor Adolf is a bad mystery. You can almost feel the way the story paints itself into a corner, knowing it will never end in any satisfactory way.

Directed by Leon Prudovsky, it’s the story of Mr. Polsky (David Hayman), described in the press notes as “a lonely and grumpy Holocaust survivor” living in a rural South American village. About the only thing that makes Mr. Polsky happy is tending to a bush of black roses, a remembrance of happier times back in Germany when his family was still alive. One day, someone purchases the dilapidated house next door and, through a series of confrontational circumstances, Mr Polsky becomes convinced that the Führer didn’t commit suicide in his bunker at the end of the war but was smuggled out eventually ending up, some 15 years later, in his neighborhood.

All he needs to do is prove it.

The tone of My Neighbor Adolf is strange, even a little off-putting. The subject matter – a Holocaust survivor and Hitler – doesn’t lend itself easily to comedy, but that’s the path Prudovsky takes. Most of Mr. Polsky’s investigations are played out using cheap physical comedy, like a gag about proving his neighbor’s German Sheppard was in his yard using dog poop as evidence. His use of a checklist of Hitlerisms – vegetarian diet, painting style, abhorrence of drinking and smoking – to reveal the truth about his neighbor also leads to some slapstick that falls flat. The director’s use of a jaunty soundtrack to underscore it all is jarring.

Along with the problematic tone of the work, the story itself doesn’t work. It’s unbelievable to think that a concentration camp survivor who lost his entire family to the Führer’s Final Solution would ever become friendly, let alone friends, with the man he feels responsible for the murder of millions. It would take a much better script and director to pull that off, and it would still leave the audience questioning why it should be done in the first place.

Hayman does a great job when Mr. Polsky is just being a grumpy old man, finding a natural comedy in the way his character rejects the world around him. He’s far less convincing when he starts to soften and find good in the alleged personification of evil. As the man who may be Adolf, the legendary Udo Kier gives the kind of intense, off-the-wall performance he’s made a decades-long career out of, but it overshadows, even overpowers, everything else in the film.