Rating: NR | Runtime: 102 minutes
Release Date: March 11th, 2026 (USA)
Studio: Trafalgar Releasing
Director(s): Finn Taylor
Writer(s): Finn Taylor

Never is a long time.

Born in 1929 Czechoslovakia, Herbert Heller had a comfortable childhood alongside his parents and brother until the Nazis arrived during World War II. Even then, however, his father did everything possible to pretend that comfort remained despite reality constantly exposing his sentiments as a lie. Herbert senior was an engineer who couldn’t fathom the Germans risking the country’s brightest minds just to adhere to their evil ideology. He was, of course, wrong.

We meet Herbert Jr. (Stephen Lang) as an old man facing a terminal diagnosis in Northern California during The Aughts. A happily married father who runs an admired children’s store, he’s held his secret of surviving Terezin, Auschwitz, and the Nazi death march from everyone for sixty years only to have his impending sense of mortality bring those memories and nightmares flooding back. Unable to tell his family outright, he approaches the Holocaust Foundation for help.

The resulting first-hand account of Heller’s harrowing experience would lead him into an unplanned public speaking career wherein he touched countless young teens and inspired them to find the courage to keep going no matter how difficult things seemed. Producer Jeanine Thomas was one of the people who helped book those events before spending a decade self-financing a way to put Herbert’s story onto the big screen and expand his reach even further.

From what I’ve gleaned, the script that director Finn Taylor wrote to fulfill that dream is a fiction. The idea was to merge Heller’s Holocaust account with the work he did after finally revealing that past, so the Abby character (Elsie Fisher) becomes more of an amalgamation than any one specific person. How would his story inspire someone three generations younger than himself? What would that person be experiencing to absorb his voice of bravery?

So, a fated rendezvous is born where Herbert, fresh from the doctor telling him to fear the worst, walks past a sedated Abby being rushed on a gurney through the hospital halls. It was fated because the person the Holocaust Foundation found to record his statement just happens to also be her rehab center psychologist. Ruth (Robin Weigert) sees this is a “two birds, one stone” scenario wherein Herbert and Abby can potentially heal each other’s pain.

The film therefore unfolds via a series of flashbacks. Herbert sees the desperation in Abby’s face and strikes up a bargain that he’ll explain the scar on his forearm if she explains the bandage on her neck. His tale is straightforward and linear from those days of his father’s (Slavko Sobin) false hope to the horrors of camp life and the inevitable disappearances of his mother (Stella Stocker’s Karel) and brother (Oskar Hes’ Hein). When Abby struggles, he picks up where he left off.

This occurs often since she doesn’t quite know where to start or how to process what led to this moment. A friendship erased (with Ursula Parker’s Sabrina). An absentee mother (Leah Pipes). An abusive father (Ben Geurens). We catch snippets as Herbert’s questions conjure fragments she cannot fully comprehend before pushing them aside to return focus onto him. We figure it out pretty quickly, though, and then we wait for her to speak it aloud.

It’s an intriguing way to frame the film because it renders his account of survival into the main narrative thread’s catalyst instead of the reason we’re here. In many ways, The Optimist (as much a title about Herbert’s father’s positivity in the face of terror as Herbert’s own hope for the future to survive our own present-day hardships) is more about connecting with Abby than the past. This fact doesn’t do the whole many favors, though, since those flashbacks hold the most impact.

This is true both because of the subject matter itself (not to diminish Abby’s struggles, but we are talking about the Holocaust) and young Luke David Blumm’s central performance within (not to mention Stocker and Sobin’s emotional supporting roles). It’s impossible not be get drawn into the details of Herbert’s memories and the mixture of despair, luck, and perseverance within them. Every survivor’s story is akin to a miracle.

So, the audience is being asked to overcome this disparity of impact. Some will surely argue it’s a disparity of effectiveness, but I think that is unfair to the work Lang and Fisher are doing on the other side. I don’t think equating her struggle with his is some failure of relativity either since the whole reason we’re being told about Heller’s struggle is because of how teens like Abby turned their lives around after hearing it. Empathy doesn’t operate on levels.

You either have the humanity to acknowledge someone else’s pain or you don’t. To say you can when it comes to Herbert but not when it comes to Abby is simply admitting that your empathy is motivated by selfishness. We’re talking about teenagers in both instances, after all. Kids experiencing the sort of anguish that no one their age should regardless of era, context, or support systems. It’s never “You don’t have it that bad.” It’s “I’m sorry you’ve endured that.”

In that respect, Taylor’s script succeeds in bridging the gap by stripping his present-day leads of age and impact to simply exist as victims with the capacity to see their pain in the other’s face and recognize they aren’t alone. Hearing Herbert’s tale gives Abby the strength to keep going and seeing her rise from the darkness of her thoughts quiets his guilt by bestowing purpose onto his survival. Their openness and vulnerability ultimately lighten both of their souls.

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Stephen Lang and Elsie Fisher in THE OPTIMIST; courtesy of Trafalgar Releasing.