NR | 1h 42m | Holocaust, Drama | 2026
Obviously, Holocaust stories aren’t the easiest subject matter to make captivating movies out of. “The Optimist: The Bravest Act Is Truth,” based on a true story, has a bit of a hard time getting started, but it’s well worth the wait.
First, we’re shown the converging destinies of the two main characters—old man Herbert (Stephen Lang) and young woman Abby (Elsie Fisher). They cross paths in a hospital but don’t yet run into each other.
Herbert, after getting the news that he’s terminal and should get his affairs in order, returns to the children’s apparel shop he’s run for decades in Northern California. He hangs up a half-price-off sign. Abby has been seen in sessions at Redwoods Recovery with her therapist Ruth (Robin Weigert), who is having trouble getting through to her.
Set a Thief to Catch a Thief
Ruth receives a phone call from a mutual friend, who asks her to see Herbert. He spent his adult life refusing to speak about his boyhood at the Auschwitz death camp. Ruth argues that she doesn’t take those kinds of cases anymore but then has an inspiration—why not get two recalcitrant patients to coax their respective stories out of each other?
Ruth disguises the ploy by asking Abby to be the technician who films Herbert’s story for posterity. At the first recording session, after taking note of the patched-up incision Abby’s got at the base of her throat, Herbert suggests “If you tell me about your scar, I’ll tell you about mine,” referring to the acid-burn-removal of the Nazi camp tattoo on his forearm.
“The Optimist” eventually reveals itself to be an unusually thoughtful meditation on survivor’s guilt. That’s the trauma that Abby shares with Herbert, albeit of a different kind. It’s the “It takes one to know one” approach to mutual healing, and it’s very effective and quite touching.
The Terrible Tales
Flashback to young Herbert (Luke David Blumm), in Prague, as the Nazis were incrementally encroaching and removing freedoms. Hebert’s father is the eternal optimist for whom the movie is named—he’s got his head firmly buried in the sand, claiming blithely that Czechoslovakia will never fall to the Nazis. Soon, however, his wife is stitching yellow stars of David on all their clothing and it’s too late to make a run for it.
Herbert’s life is about coming to terms with the fact that he was a survivor—largely because he was a survivor. He had a gift for making himself useful and even indispensable to the Nazis. He shamelessly picked and offered the best cabbage to the garden-supervision commandant, extolling its virtues as the best sauerkraut. He managed to obtain a job in first aid, knowing he’d have easy access to drinking water, and intuiting that staying well-hydrated was key in staving off starvation’s severe hunger pangs.
As Herbert and Abby start to comfortably confide in one another, sharing a burden they thought they would have to carry alone, Abby’s story begins to take shape in the form of child trafficking, lost friends, and survived suicide pacts.
“The Optimist” doesn’t diminish the seriousness of its subject. While the scenes set at Auschwitz are far less emotionally harrowing than “Schindler’s List,” audiences may run across aspects of the camps that they haven’t seen before. These sum up the depravity that drove German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt to coin the phrase “the banality of evil.” It’s not easy to stomach the business-like, factory-like, sheep-shearing-like extermination of an ethnic group and religious group by another culture.
Like the real-life Oskar Schindler in “Schindler’s List,” the spotlight eventually goes to real-life Holocaust survivor Herbert Heller, who made telling his story to younger generations his mission in his later years. Generational healing is the gift of this movie, and one shouldn’t look this gift horse in the mouth.
In the end, and in stark and ironic contrast with the infamous Auschwitz sign “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Creates Freedom), here, putting in the work to tell the truth about Auschwitz is what creates freedom.
‘The Optimist’
Director: Finn Taylor
Starring: Stephen Lang, Elsie Fisher, Robin Weigert
Not Rated
Running Time: 1 hour, 42 minutes
Release Date: March 11, 2026
Rating: 3 1/2 stars out of 5
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