Russian-born Israeli film-maker Leonid Prudovsky has confected an unsatisfying tonal oddity: a jokey-sentimental drama with weird slashes of actual historical pain. The year is 1960 and a lonely, cantankerous Polish Holocaust survivor called Polsky (played by David Hayman) is living all on his own in a village in Colombia. Unhappy Polsky has a psychosomatic prostate complaint which makes urinating difficult; he takes what happiness he can in chess and growing a special strain of black roses.
Polsky is astonished when a high-handed and unpleasantly secretive German expat moves in to the house next door, wearing what appears to be a false beard: a Herr Herzog, played by Udo Kier. This oddly familiar-looking figure has an alsatian which makes a nuisance of itself in Polsky’s garden; he has an easel on which he paints bland daubs, an army of obedient young German men to help with yard work and redecoration and an officious German lawyer, Frau Kaltenbrunner (Olivia Silhavy), who tells Polsky that his new neighbour is in fact entitled to some of Polsky’s land, including that part where his roses are growing. Having surrendered to this petty demand for Lebensraum, Polsky becomes obsessed with the idea that this man is in fact you-know-who … the satanic figure whose body was not recovered after his widely reported suicide in the ruins of Berlin in 1945. (Polsky checks a portrait photo in a history book, which this film has cheekily doctored, just slightly, so that it resembles Kier.) Yet, bizarrely, these two men begin to thaw over their mutual love of chess.
Well, Hitler is certainly not known to have been a chess lover, which counts as a plot weakness considering all the other elaborately accurate parallels – though this isn’t really the problem, and nor is the contrived ending. It’s rather the quirky, lenient silliness of the whole idea. Repeatedly, we are invited to assent to this movie as a bittersweet heartwarmer about old people getting over the misery of loss. Kier, as ever, delivers a spoonful of black-comic menace and Hayman does an honest job. But there’s something treacly about it.
• My Neighbour Adolf is released on 4 November in cinemas and digital platforms.
