User Reviews

Hannah Stern (Kirsten Dunst) is a modern teen without much care for her Jewish ancestry. She's not that interested in the family Passover seder. Her aunt Eva (Louise Fletcher) knows that she could never understand. She goes back in time to 1941 Poland. She wakes up as Chaya who has been ill. She had traveled to attend her uncle's wedding. Her cousin Rivkah (Brittany Murphy) has been taking care of her. On the wedding day, the Nazis arrive to take everybody away. They struggle and work to build the prison camp. Ultimately Chaya takes Rivkah's place to the gas chamber. She wakes up to understand that Rivkah is her aunt Eva.

The Holocaust has been done in many ways. I certainly understand the sincerity of this attempt. It's trying to connect young people with the past. I don't think this is done with well enough. Kirsten Dunst is a solid young actress but she doesn't have enough innocence. She should be shocked and bewildered. Also there is nothing new in the concentration camp. This is not a bad attempt. The idea has potential. Louise Fletcher is great but this doesn't quite make it.

After reading the reviews here I wanted to add my thoughts. I stumbled across "The Devil's Arithmetic" while watching the True Movie channel her in the UK. I haven't heard of the book, but when I heard the description of the film I thought it would be worth watching, especially for I thought, Kristen Dunst and Brittany Murphy.

The viewer has to keep a few things in mind. First, the movie is clearly intended for a young audience. I can see that Hannah and Rivka were younger in the book than they are in the movie: about 11, one reviewer said. They do seem younger than teenagers but I thought that was to appeal more to younger viewers. Also, the ties to "The Wizard of Oz" are clearer and stronger if Hannah and Rivka were meant to be the same age as Dorothy.

Second, I was also annoyed by the Polish characters' bad accent and the commander's clipped movie German accent (It turns out that the actor who plays the commander is British). American movies usually get around the problem of characters supposedly speaking different languages by having the characters speak with heavy accents. I accepted that Rivka was speaking Polish (or Yiddish) while the commander was speaking German. We see the events through Hannah's eyes and so we hear accented English.

Third, I didn't find the historical accuracy of the film unbelievable. I was annoyed by the early scenes after Hannah wakes up in Poland. Rifka tells Hannah (and the audience) that she is in Poland in 1941. So, I thought, the village must be in eastern Poland. Most of the Jews in Poland under German occupation in 1941 were living in ghettos enforced by the Nazis. However, eastern Poland was under Russian jurisdiction. Surely the villagers would recognise the Nazis immediately – but it's Hannah who announces to the audience that the Nazis are invading the village; the Rabbi recognises the danger immediately and encourages the groom to break the wedding glass quickly. The Nazis killed numerous Jewish communities in the East in 1941 by shooting them. However, during this period they began to test other forms of eliminating Jewish populations. The camp that Rifka's community was sent to wasn't named in the movie. It was small and seemed newly built. I thought that Hannah, Rifka and the other prisoners were being put to work to expand the camp, to build more barracks and more crematoria. Gassing of prisoners began in 1941 and so its probable that the camp crematorium and gassing chamber were built and being used while Rifka and Hannah are prisoners, especially if Hannah is sent to the crematorium after Passover- this would mean spring of the following year, 1942. The only thing I found hard to believe was how Rifka survived in the camp until after the war ended, particularly if she was ill before Hannah was selected for execution. If she was already ill how could she survive for another three years? But this is left to the audience to surmise: it could be she escaped from the camp, or was transferred somewhere else, or was assigned less physically demanding work such as sorting clothes.

I was still annoyed by Hannah waking up with all her family around her – in black and white yet. Like one reviewer said, I was waiting for Toto to jump into her arms. Comparing Dorothy's adventure in Oz to the horrors of the Holocaust is slight, but the scene that follows with Hannah telling Aunt Eva she now clearly sees the importance of her heritage is very moving. Kristen Dunst portrays well how Hannah reacts and adapts to monstrous circumstances and Brittany Murphy is convincing and heartbreaking as Rifka, despite her clichéd accent. "The Devil's Arithmetic" moved me although I'm an adult who has seen many films and read many books about the Holocaust. While it is clearly intended for a young audience, it is an engrossing movie for all ages.

I understand this movie is an intro to the holocaust for Jewish teens but it is honesty so watered down that it feels like your watching a bad summer camp movie. Everyone in here acts as though they are slightly inconvenienced by the Nazi's detaining and murdering them. There is no emotional impact in this movie as this makes the holocaust look tame. The most emotional scene is when poor little Kristen Dunst gets her hair cut boo ho. I loved how all the prisoners looked clean and like they had makeup on, they want to look good for the Nazi's. The hanging scene was so unemotional it felt fake. I would think if you watched your family get killed like that you would lose your freaking mind not mildly sob like your boyfriend broke up with you. There was no emotional agony from families being torn apart, it's like they accepted their fate without going through any of the coping stages. It would be like if they made a movie where a woman is diagnosed with terminal cancer and has a month to live and she brushes it off with no emotional response and went on with her daily life. If you wanted teens to come back from this movie changed you're deluding yourself. Teens see more graphic violence on TV and video games, I think they could handle the gruesome accounts from the holocaust. Hell, it would be better to expose then to the horrors of the holocaust before they become so numb to violence that it wouldn't effect them at all. Christian parents dragged their little brats to watch Passion of The Christ, the worst snuff film in history, I think Jewish kids could handle Schindler's List.

The second thing I hated about this movie was it's blatant moral motive. This move is meant to guilt trip Jewish kids into accepting their religious heritage. I have never believed in the idea that scaring and forcing children into faith is an ethical or effective means to conserve religion. There are more effective and loving ways to teach faith. This movie feels like the Christian equivalent of telling a child they will burn in eternal pain if they don't believe and live by religious dogma. Children should be free to decide for themselves and a loving family would support them.

The ending was so bland and unemotional. They stripped the women down, magically no nudity, forced them into a small room and dropped blue cat litter from the ceiling and then suddenly everyone died instantly with no suffering. The way the nude girls fell to the ground as the camera pulled away and faded out looked like a cheesy album cover, again they managed to magically show no nudity. Everything about this movie failed. It made me laugh and you should never laugh about something so horrible.

While understanding that this was a low budget production, it suffers in many ways by being too sanitized and almost absurdly fantastical. Kirsten Dunst was a serious mis-casting for this film. Her performance seemed forced and amateurish, as if she was reading lines for a freshman production of the holocaust for a high school theatre troop.

She approaches the role with less authenticity than Judy Garland finding herself somewhere over the rainbow.

Most of the performances in this film were either bland and lifeless or overplayed which gives this film a lack of any emotional balance and makes it difficult to truly feel or appreciate the actual horrors of the subject matter.

The best thing about this film is Brittany Murphy. In the scene where her mother is taken to be murdered by the Nazis her raw and agonizing grief is so authentic you finally truly feel the soul shattering experience of what living through this was like.

Overall this movie suffers from poor script writing, an emotionally devoid and dated score, and a longwinded, lumbering pace that fails to build any connection with the people or their suffering.

If you're okay with the excessively cheesy Hallmark or Lifetime made for TV melodramas of the late 80's early 90's then this film will probably appeal to you. If not, you'll probably want to give this one a pass.

I'm sorry; if I were suddenly finding myself from any time post-WWII, the first thing I would do is try to convince ANYONE I'm from the future. This isn't actually that difficult to do. Even if that weren't an option, knowing that the Nazis murdered more than 6 million Jewish people in Europe, I would MAYBE try to find out the year. And then try to figure out how I'm speaking a language I don't know.

I think Brittany Murphy (rip) and Kirsten Dunst do a very good job. But the first half hour is just ... silly.

We all heard of the Holocaust. We all know about the evil Nazis and the atrocities that happened during that horrible time, but none of us were there. It's hard to imagine what it was like and what those people went through.

This is the story of a modern girl in a Jewish family. She is not interested in hearing the stories of her relatives who survived the concentration camps because the idea is so foreign to her it's almost laughable.She reluctantly attends a passover seder with her parents where her aunts and uncles talk about "the camps" and she just dismisses the conversation. When she goes to put out the ceremonial cup of wine for Elijah, the profit she is transported in time to a village in Poland (I think it was poland). Everyone recognizes her as Hannah (her ancestor she was named after). She wakes up in a surreal "wizard of Oz like" setting where she is awaken after an apparent illness. Her "cousin" Rifka (played so sweetly by Brittany Murphy)tries to help her jar her "memory" of being her "cousin from Lublin" who is visiting". They walk through their quaint village as everyone is preparing for a wedding. Hannah is confused, but seems to just go with her new reality without too much question.

After the wedding is over several cars pull up to the village with Nazis with guns and trucks to transport the Jews to the camps. The people are scared and confused, but Hannah is the most terrified as she has the terrible forsight of what is about to happen.

She tries to figure out what is going on, whether she is dreaming, hallucinating, or what, but eventually realizes she is now a Jew in a concentration camp during world war 2 like it or not and she has to let fate play out.

This movie is powerful. To see the holocaust from the perspective of someone who already knows what has happened is chilling. From the time they arrive at the camp and are stripped of their clothes, dignity, money, possessions, have their hair shaved, are forced into slave labor and eventually murdered. Obviously the girl (hannah's) life would be changed forever if she ever woke up from the nightmare.

Great film.