The Devil’s Arithmetic 1999

A teenage girl confronts history by stepping through time, only to find her sense of belonging at stake. Hannah Stern, Kirsten Dunst, sits in a tattoo parlor with friends, wrestling with what ink might mirror her inner world. The clock ticks toward a Passover dinner, and she dreads the same stories that feel rehearsed year after year. Her aunt keeps teasing that Hannah bears a striking resemblance to their family namesake, Chana, yet she never reveals who Chana really was or what she did. In a moment that blurs fantasy and waking life, Hannah reaches for the door to invite in Elijah, but instead the door reveals a Polish village—and the year 1941.

Suddenly transplanted, she meets Rivka, Brittany Murphy, who introduces herself as Hannah’s cousin in the imagined identity of Chana, and an aunt named Gitl. They tell Hannah that she has been sick with cholera, a diagnosis that explains the strange visions of the future she’s been experiencing. The family soon heads into the village for a wedding, a celebration that is violently interrupted by Nazi soldiers announcing mass resettlement and leaving behind a burned temple. What follows is a brutal migration into a Nazi concentration camp, where prisoners are stripped of their humanity: valuables disappear, hair is shaved, and numbers are tattooed on their bodies.

Within the camp, life is relentlessly harsh, yet Hannah keeps hope alive by telling fairy tales to the women in her bunk. She clings to lessons from history class, insisting that she understands what is coming, even as others dismiss her predictions. Tensions flare when a family is struck by typhus, and when a woman goes into labor, a group of men attempt an escape, only to be executed by hanging after discovery.

The camp’s commandant, Krieger, notices Rivka and others falling ill and orders them toward the gas chamber. In a desperate act, Hannah swaps places with Rivka, stepping into the chamber and waking up back in her present-day living room. She’s surrounded by her relieved family, who remark that she had perhaps overindulged a bit too much. In a quiet, private moment, Hannah confides to her Aunt Eva, Louise Fletcher details Rivka had shared, and Eva listens with a mixture of sorrow and recognition. The revelation mends a fragment of the rift between past and present.

Back at the dinner table, the family lifts their voices in traditional songs, and Hannah experiences a transformative sense of belonging. No longer an outsider, she becomes an integral part of the family’s memory and celebration, carried by the shared history they sing into the room. The film closes on this reconciled moment, where the boundaries between generations and lives blur, allowing Hannah to carry both her current self and the echoes of Chana with renewed heart and acceptance.