Udo Kier Posthumously Does His Finest as (Perhaps) Hitler in Bumbling, Unwell-Conceived Comedy

Ubiquitous German actor Udo Kier appeared in over 220 movies by the point of his dying in November 2025, and in his final two theatrical releases he’s each a Holocaust survivor in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent and, probably, the Führer himself, in Leon Prudovsky’s exceedingly awkward comedy My Neighbor Adolf. That is versatility of some type, although I am positive the late beloved artist would most likely want the previous’s grace to the latter’s clunk.

My Neighbor Adolf is an actual head-scratcher. It’s successfully a two-hander buddy comedy that asks you to be sympathetic in direction of certainly one of historical past’s nice villains, treating each Nazism and excessive PTSD as character quirks. Each Kier and his sparring associate David Hayman, who performs a depressed and bitter Polish Jew, give Prudovsky’s movie a weight it does not deserve, however the movie is so mired by its personal determined have to be preferred that it forgets what its personal subject material is. Like Taika Waititi’s equally puerile Jojo Rabbit, My Neighbor Adolf turns into irksome in its relentless insistence on friendship.

My Neighbor Adolf Basically Misfires From the Hip

To be honest, it isn’t like Marek Polsky (Hayman) is aware of for positive that his neighbor Herman Herzog (Kier) is the long-presumed useless chancellor of the Third Reich. He solely is aware of that his new German neighbor has a hanging resemblance to Hitler’s greyish-blue eyes, which he as soon as witnessed up shut on the 1934 chess championships in Berlin. However Marek, who has remoted himself on this tiny quiet nook someplace in South America, is so traumatized by the lack of his whole household to the dying camps that the opportunity of retribution towards Hitler is just too engaging to query rationally.

It is Might 1960, and Mossad forces have simply kidnapped Adolf Eichmann from Argentina and illegally extradited him again to the 11-year-old state of Israel. May Hitler be subsequent? Sure, sure, Hitler “killed himself,” however let’s simply say that Marek is doubtful if that is the reality. In a determined assembly with the Israeli consulate (Dorota Liliental), he argues that the Soviets’ refusal to show over Hitler’s cremated physique is the smoking gun hiding the reality: Hitler continues to be alive, and he is residing proper subsequent door.

Hayman, who’s Scottish, performs Marek with slicing abrasiveness. He’s nearly charming in his dedication to being a curmudgeon. He speaks English with a tough rolling “r” and scowls at just about anybody unlucky sufficient to cross his path. The one factor that appears to convey him consolation is the caring of a modest black rose bush, which he does by way of an old style utility of crushed eggshells blended in water. When Herman arrives together with his litigious assistant Frau Kaltenbrunner (Olivia Silhavy) in tow, Marek instantly shifts into paranoiac suspicion, kicked into overdrive when Herman’s canine poops on his backyard.

Thus begins a weird sequence of occasions wherein Marek tries to assemble proof to current the consulate, and, in his protection, there are lots of odd similarities. Kaltenbrunner marches like an SS officer, and Herman is a sober left-handed painter with a Nazi-embossed protected and a canine the identical breed as Hitler’s beloved Blondie. If he might by some means discover out if Herman has monorchism, or the uncommon affliction of getting just one testicle, as Hitler was rumored to have, then he’d have every thing he wants. However then, one evening, whereas spying on Herman with a telephoto lens a la Rear Window, Marek witnesses a bunch of mysterious strangers heiling and calling him mein führer. Smoking gun, certainly.

Prudovsky needs us to purchase into the concept that this man could possibly be Hitler, however he additionally needs us to root for his or her enemies-to-lovers friendship. More often than not, he cannot pull it off.

The issue is that Marek is beginning to like his neighbor, and, properly, perhaps even like like him. On the very least, Prudovsky and co-writer Dmitry Malinsky have actually imbued the script with a tonnage of gay coding, which is both a nod to the unsubstantiated conspiracy idea that Hitler was closeted or a reprehensible determination to make a Holocaust survivor and a warfare felony have sexual chemistry.

To make certain, the script has some enjoyable, subtler touches of comedian lightness that do work, as within the metonymic reference to the German invasion of Poland, or the jab at how Israel bombed away the Yiddish language in favor of the extra nationalistic Hebrew. There’s additionally a enjoyable poke at Israeli claims of indigeneity when the consulate officer affords Marek “conventional Israeli espresso” which is Turkish. However most of it simply actually, actually does not work. It tries to play on an endlessly precarious tightrope. Prudovsky needs us to purchase into the concept that this man could possibly be Hitler, however he additionally needs us to root for his or her enemies-to-lovers friendship. More often than not, he cannot pull it off.

My Neighbor Adolf ends with a completely wild twist that’s confounding and ridiculous and with none historic substantiation. It looks like it was shoved into the movie to justify the earlier eighty minutes of tomfoolery. Kier and Hayman each come out clear right here, nevertheless, and if there’s something to remove from the movie it’s that the late actor was a real chameleon, in a position to make us all really feel one thing deeply profound, whatever the pores and skin he is sporting.

My Neighbor Adolf opens in choose theaters on January ninth, 2026.