Top Photo: Movie poster for A Real Pain. Searchlight Pictures Pressroom. 2024

Among the films nominated for 2025’s Academy Awards, two address World War II—but instead of a drama or documentary focusing on the experiences of people during the war itself, the films A Real Pain and The Brutalist deal with how Jewish victims of the Holocaust moved to the United States and built new lives for themselves and their families. In different ways, both films demonstrate that although the war may have ended in May 1945, it left lasting scars and traumas that lingered with Holocaust survivors and their descendants long after the fighting was over in Europe.

A Real Pain: Grandchildren of Survivors Reckon with the Holocaust

In A Real Pain, which received two Oscar nominations for writing and acting, writer and director Jesse Eisenberg has made a film that closely reflects his own experience as an American Jew who grew up knowing that some of his family members perished in the Holocaust, while others survived and came to the United States. Eisenberg also stars the film, playing one of two American cousins (the other is played by Kieran Culkin, who won for Best Supporting Actor for his performance) who travel to Poland to go on a historical tour of the country, visiting cities that once had thriving Jewish communities and sites connected to the Holocaust, including the site of the death camp at Majdanek.

From 1978’s NBC miniseries Holocaust to Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List in 1993 and The Zone of Interest in 2023, numerous filmmakers have told the story of the Holocaust on the large and small screens. Knowing this background, Eisenberg did not set out to recreate historical events of the Holocaust, but instead follows two fictional characters exploring the history of the Holocaust and their family’s connection to those atrocities in the present day. As Eisenberg described it in an interview with Time Magazine, he took a hyper-realistic approach to his subject “to tell the story of these two characters who have ambivalent feelings about their own pain versus the pain of their ancestors, and to shoot their experience at Majdanek in the most austere, simple, straightforward way.”1

A Real Pain culminates in a visit to the remains of the Majdanek death camp as it exists today. Despite its heavy, somber subject, the film has moments of genuine humor, as the two main characters reflect on their upbringing as the grandchildren of a Holocaust survivor and the evolution of their relationship from their childhood to the present day.

The Brutalist: “I Would Not Know Where to Begin”  

Unlike A Real Pain, humorous moments are few and far between in The Brutalist, which received 10 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor. Directed by Brady Corbet and starring Adrien Brody, the film tells the story of a fictional Hungarian Jewish architect, Lászlo Tóth, who came to the United States in 1946 after surviving the Holocaust. At the start of the film, in a scene that resembles other powerful moments in films such as The Godfather Part II (1974) and The Immigrant (2014), Tóth, played by Brody, celebrates with joy and relief as his ship arrives in New York City harbor and passes the Statue of Liberty. But unlike those other films, Lady Liberty appears upside down, an early sign that Tóth’s arrival in the United States will not be the end of his troubles.

Although he survived World War II and escaped Europe, Tóth must live with the traumas of the war and the Holocaust every day in the United States. Settling in Philadelphia, Tóth struggles to build a new life for himself, working in his cousin’s furniture store as he waits for his wife and niece to join him in Pennsylvania. When asked about the war by a sympathetic woman at a dinner table, Tóth can only reply, “I would not know where to begin.”

Over the course of the film, Tóth reveals that he spent time at several infamous Nazi concentration camps, including Dachau and Buchenwald. Arriving in the United States in the immediate years after World War II, the fictional Tóth would have been one of tens of thousands of Jewish displaced persons who traveled from Allied occupation zones in Germany to new homes around the world, including America.2

While Tóth was not a real person, his character resembles several real European architects who came to the United States around the time of World War II. One such inspiration was Marcel Breuer, a Hungarian Jewish architect who came to the US in the late 1930s and experienced antisemitism in his new home country, much like Tóth does. In several interviews, Corbet and his co-writer and collaborator Mona Fastvold cited Breuer as an influence in shaping their character Tóth.3  Early in the film, Tóth designs a chair for sale at his cousin’s furniture store that resembles a design created by Breuer.

In an early scene with his future patron and antagonist Harrison van Buren, a wealthy American businessman played by Guy Pearce, who was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his performance, Tóth reveals that he trained at the Bauhaus school, a major art and architectural school founded in 1919 in Weimar, Germany. In the late 1920s, around the time that the time that the fictional Tóth would have studied there, Marcel Breuer was one of the school’s instructors.4

The film’s title references an architectural movement known as brutalism, which emerged in Western Europe and the United States in the decades after World War II. An outgrowth of modernism in the early 20th century, brutalist architecture relied heavily on concrete as a building material and rejected ostentatious ornamentation in favor of blunt designs that would stand the test of time.

There are many prominent examples of brutalist architecture in the United States, including prominent local and federal government buildings such as the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Boston’s City Hall.5

Corbet draws a direct link between this style of architecture and the horrors of World War II. As he told an interviewer from Script Magazine, “Brutalism, for me, felt like the correct visual allegory for exploring post-war trauma because it is a style of post-war architecture that came about in the 1950s and feels very much in dialogue with the previous period of the two World Wars.”6  

In another scene with van Buren, Tóth reveals that his buildings and his whole architectural vision were dismissed by the Nazis, along with the artists who created them, who were persecuted and murdered in the Holocaust. But Tóth found a measure of revenge and hope against his tormentors by believing that his creations will endure long after the fall of the Nazi regime.

Despite their differences, A Real Pain and The Brutalist underscore how the damage and trauma of war and genocide lingered long after liberation. Together, the two films also attest to filmmakers’ continued interest in the events of World War II. 

• 1

  Esther Zuckerman, “How Jessie Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin Made A Different Kind of Holocaust Movie,” Time Magazine, November 1, 2024. (URL: https://time.com/7106793/jesse-eisenberg-kieran-culkin-interview-a-real-pain/). Accessed 2/1/25. 

• 2

  Leonard Dinnerstein, America and the Survivors of the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 

• 3

  See for instance Isaac Feldberg, “The Trauma of Inevitability: Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold on ‘The Brutalist’,” RogerEbert.Com, January 13, 2025. (URL: https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/the-brutalist-interview). Accessed 2/1/25. On Breuer, see Paul Goldberger, “MARCEL BREUER, 79, DIES; ARCHITECT AND DESIGNER,” The New York Times, July 2, 1981. 

• 4

  Alexandra Griffith Winton, “The Bauhaus, 1919-1933,” in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000). (http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/bauh/hd_bauh.htm). Accessed 2/1/25.  

• 5

  Kaity Kline, “Why brutalist buildings should stay, even if people think they're ugly,” National Public Radio, August 12, 2024. (URL: https://www.npr.org/2024/08/12/g-s1-6417/brutalism-architecture-carbon-emissions). Accessed 2/2/24. 

• 6

  Susan Kouguell, “Interview with ‘The Brutalist’ Filmmakers Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold,” Script Magazine, January 14, 2025. (URL: https://scriptmag.com/interviews-features/interview-with-the-brutalist-filmmakers-brady-corbet-and-mona-fastvold). Accessed 2/1/25.