The Tattooist of Auschwitz: The TV adaptation of the best-selling book is here but it’s full of problems

Published in 2018, Heather Morris’s The Tattooist of Auschwitz was a proper literary phenomenon. Inspired by a true story, the book sold an estimated 12 million copies — an astonishing figure for a first-time novelist, and by the time it landed on shelves, Morris’s publishers had already sold the screen rights.

The Tattooist of Auschwitz - Official Teaser

Six years on, the buzz appears to have worn off, and yet, this long-awaited six-part adaptation comes with a built-in audience. Some will be looking forward to it; others will undoubtedly worry about the inevitable awkwardness. It brings me no joy to report that there are problems, and lots of them.

Ludwig ‘Lali’ Sokolov (Harvey Keitel), a Slovakian Jewish widower living in Australia, is approaching the end of his life and, as such, would like to share his story with another person. Enter Melanie Lynskey’s Heather, a hospital social worker with a casual interest in writing. A mutual friend arranges for Heather to visit Lali at his Melbourne apartment. She says she’ll listen; he agrees to talk. It’s throughout these interview-type exchanges that a haunted Lali revisits the horrors of the Holocaust.

Picking up in 1942, Lali (now Jonah Hauer-King) is a young man with his whole life ahead of him. That life is put on hold when Lali, like so many others, is deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp by the Slovak government. Here, the men and women are divided into separate camps. Their heads are shaved, their clothes stripped from their bodies and their belongings destroyed by Nazis.

His physical health soon deteriorates, but Lali somehow clings on to the idea that there is a life for him beyond this hellish landscape. His hope isn’t imaginary. It is, in fact, a person: Anna Próchniak’s Gita, a young Slovak woman who Lali meets when he is assigned a ‘Tätowierer’ position in the camp.

It’s Lali’s job to tattoo identification numbers on to prisoners’ arms. Gita is one such prisoner, and their initial encounter changes everything. It is, essentially, love at first sight, and so Lali does everything he can to keep Gita in his life. He finds ways to communicate with her, first through scribbled notes, later, through secret meetings arranged by a volatile SS officer (Jonas Nay’s Stefan Baretzki). But how long can Lali and Gita play pretend for? And how long can they keep one another alive?

Indeed, The Tattooist of Auschwitz (Sky Atlantic, Now) spoils itself from the outset. The problem with having the main character narrate his life story — one that ends with Lali and Gita marrying and sharing a long life together — is that it ruins the suspense. True, this isn’t the first tale to outline its conclusion before it begins, but it is perhaps one of the few that struggles to craft a convincing narrative out of a real-life saga. The central concept is mawkish and melodramatic, and the delivery is like that of a drippy Nicholas Sparks yarn.

There are slip-ups in the casting department. Keitel works hard, and he is very good here, but his younger counterpart, Hauer-King, is out of his depth and has neither the presence nor the charisma to pull off a role like this. The love story stuff suits him, but he struggles with everything else. Our Lalis speak differently, too; Keitel swings for a patchy, Eastern European flavour, while Hauer-King retains a well-mannered British accent. Próchniak is better, but only just, and this dreary, tonally discombobulated series is ill-equipped to tackle the weightier elements of its historical set-up.

It swerves recklessly from syrupy melodrama to shocking Holocaust horror, sometimes within a single scene. One minute, it shows us Lali and Gita sharing their first kiss; the next, we are presented with the faces of those who have lost their lives in the camp. It hardly helps that the characters speak to one another in broken English, instead of their native languages.

If it sounds messy, that’s because it is, and it’s an uncomfortable watch, in more ways than one. Elsewhere, the interview segments lift us out of the story completely. Lynskey suffers here — her scenes are awkwardly scripted and poorly managed, and some of them feel as if they’ve been plucked from a different project. The Tattooist of Auschwitz means well, I’m sure, but it’s a careless, clumsy series.

The Tattooist of Auschwitz premieres on Sky Atlantic/Now TV, May 2 at 9pm