My Neighbor Adolf Review: Feud With The Führer?

In My Neighbor Adolf, an ageing Holocaust survivor suspects the new man next door might just be the Führer himself.

The adjoining garden is home to an equally dilapidated house, outside of which is a number to call for any interested buyers, but it has been shoddily defaced. The message to estate agents is clear: Polsky wants to be left alone.

When an ageing German (Udo Kier, on typically fine form in one of his final roles) moves in next door under cover of dark, Polsky takes objection, especially when his new neighbour’s german shepherd breaks through the fence and damages the black roses. It all escalates when, upon seeing the man’s blue eyes, normally hidden behind sunglasses, Polsky suspects he is Hitler himself. It’s 1960, Adolf Eichmann has just been captured hiding in Argentina, and whatever happened to the Führer’s body, anyway?

There was some objection upon Jojo Rabbit’s release to its comedic and mocking tone with regards to the Holocaust, and My Neighbor Adolf is vulnerable to similar criticisms. Polsky, whose dead family looks back at him from a framed photo on the shelf and who is reminded everyday of Nazi atrocities by the concentration camp tattoo on his arm, has immeasurable trauma, but you wouldn’t know it from the film’s cartoonish score and toilet-based humour. Before long, the feuding men are urinating on cars and posting faeces through letterboxes.

My Neighbor Adolf’s concept – what if Hitler were still alive and living next door? – has the makings of a taut thriller, and indeed Marek goes Rear Window on his neighbour by setting up a camera to spy on the shifty figures who come and go, but the stakes are often undercut by the japes. As a paranoid Marek ticks off his neighbour’s traits that align with Hitler’s – likes painting, hates smoking, has outbursts of anger – it’s less amateur detective and more schoolboy with a project. On balance, there is far too much light and too many doses of silly to grapple with the subject matter’s severity.

Further narrative tensions arise when the warring men inevitably soften, bonding over a shared love of chess. Polsky warms to his neighbour, who finally introduces himself as Hermann Herzog, while his suspicions continue to grow. He poses for one of Herzog’s paintings, which turns out to be a tenderly made portrait…almost entirely in the style of Hitler’s art. Herzog constantly downs alcohol in Marek’s company, and although Hitler was not a drinker, Herzog says he wasn’t able to drink for the last 30 years because of his work. But these scenes of elderly companionship are the film’s best. As they share food and discuss women, they’re just two men in life’s later stages letting their guard down, at least one of whom has certainly been through too much. 

But most of what one could expect from a Holocaust film is suppressed for a nuts-and-bolts story of a rural feud between pensioners. It is too gently funny to be subversive, and Marek is too much of an animated nosy neighbour to appreciate as a man living with immense horrors. My Neighbor Adolf is to be cherished for its sweet scenes of friendship and resolution, then, and less so for its post-WWII paranoia.

My Neighbor Adolf will be released in select US theatres on January 9, 2026. In the UK & Ireland and more countries, the film is now available to watch on digital and on demand.

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