Netflix released a film that has already become its most quietly devastating, most unforgettable addition in years. Titled My Name Is Sarah, it tells the true story of 13-year-old Sarah Blum, a Jewish girl from Warsaw who, in the span of a single afternoon in September 1939, watched her father, mother, and little brother dragged into the street and shot for refusing to surrender a hidden radio. What the Nazis took next was infinitely crueler: her name, her faith, her right to exist as herself.

The film opens with a sequence so merciless that audiences have reported needing to pause the stream just to breathe. We hear only Sarah’s ragged breathing and the distant crack of rifles. Ninety seconds later, everything she has ever known is gone. Within weeks she is shoved into the Warsaw Ghetto. Within months she is standing in a Catholic orphanage on the Aryan side, being handed a forged papers and a new identity: Maria Nowak. The Mother Superior’s whisper becomes the film’s haunting refrain: “From this moment forward, you were never born Jewish. One slip, one tear during the wrong prayer, one Yiddish word under your breath, and you are dead.”

What director Agnieszka Holland achieves over the next two hours is nothing short of a masterclass in sustained, suffocating dread. This is not the Holocaust of sweeping orchestras and last-minute miracles. This is the Holocaust of whispered rosary beads, carbolic soap, and the slow, methodical murder of a child’s soul so that her body might live. Holland, herself the daughter of survivors and the filmmaker behind masterpieces such as Europa Europa and In Darkness, has never gone this deep into the psychological cost of survival. The result is a film that feels less like historical drama and more like a slow-motion nightmare you cannot look away from.

At the center stands 15-year-old Polish actress Lilia Nowak in a performance already being called one of the greatest child acting turns in cinema history. She ages five years before our eyes, her face shifting from soft childhood roundness to something colder, harder, more terrifyingly adult. There is a forty-seven-second close-up roughly halfway through in which “Maria” must publicly denounce another Jewish girl to protect her cover. A single tear rolls down her cheek, yet her expression never changes. Critics have compared the moment to Ana Torrent’s stare in The Spirit of the Beehive, but with the added weight of knowing every second of silence could mean death.

The film refuses comforting myths. The nuns are not saints; some are quietly antisemitic, others simply exhausted by the moral impossible. A priest forges papers in exchange for absolute obedience. A Polish family hides her for three months and then trades her for a reward when the price goes up. Even the resistance fighters who eventually smuggle her out debate whether one teenage girl is worth risking the entire cell. The deepest betrayal, however, comes from within. In the film’s most unbearable scene, Sarah is briefly reunited with a childhood friend who survived Treblinka and recognizes her instantly. For one heartbeat, Sarah feels whole again. Then terror floods in. If this girl knows who she really is, others might too. In a choice no child should ever have to make, Sarah calls her friend a liar and watches her being led away. The camera stays on her face as the door closes. She does not cry. She has already forgotten how.

Early reviews have been unanimous in their reverence. The Guardian declared it “the most important Holocaust film since Son of Saul.” Variety called it “a masterpiece of restrained devastation that will haunt viewers for years.” The Hollywood Reporter warned, “You will not recover quickly, if at all.” At its world premiere at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival, the closing credits rolled to total silence for nearly a minute before the audience rose in a twelve-minute standing ovation, many openly weeping in the aisles.

The real Sarah Blum, now in her late nineties and living anonymously in Israel under the name she was given in that orphanage eighty years ago, cooperated with the film on one condition: her current identity must remain forever secret. In her only filmed interview (face in shadow, voice altered), she says quietly, “I still wake up at night not knowing who I am. For eighty years I have answered to a name that is not mine. Sometimes I think Sarah died in 1939 and Maria simply kept walking.”

Agnieszka Holland, voice breaking at the TIFF press conference, called My Name Is Sarah the culmination of her life’s work. “We think we know these stories,” she said. “We know the trains, the camps, the statistics. We do not know what it costs a child to survive by murdering the child she was.”

My Name Is Sarah is not an easy watch, nor was it ever meant to be. There are no swelling strings when the war ends, no triumphant march into sunlight. There is only a girl who learned to un-become herself one prayer, one lie, one forgotten lullaby at a time, and who is still, eight decades later, waiting for a world safe enough to remember who she once was.

When the final frame fades to black, the screen remains silent for several seconds before white text appears:

“Sarah Blum is still alive. She has never spoken her real name in public. This film is the closest she will ever come.”

You will carry this story with you long after the credits roll. You will think of it when someone says “never again” too lightly. You will think of it when you teach your children about courage, about identity, about the price of simply existing.

Because somewhere, an old woman still answers to a stranger’s name, waiting for the day the world is safe enough for Sarah to come home.

My Name Is Sarah is now streaming on Netflix.