Eleanor The Great

TIFF REVIEW: BY EDEN PROSSER

September 26, 2025

4 OUT OF 5 STARS

A little lie white never hurt anybody. At least, that’s the mentality of Eleanor Morgenstern (June Squibb), the sprightly nonagenarian whose playful fibs belie a feistiness, a spirit, as she laughs through life with lifelong best friend Bessie. Yet when Bessie suffers a cardiac arrest during a routine shopping trip, Eleanor is encouraged to return to the bustling metropolis of her adolescence, trading curmudgeonly beachside escapades for supervised restraint. Though her estranged daughter believes she’s doing her a favour, questing for retirement homes around the city, enrolling her in classes at the local JCC, her view of Eleanor’s age as a limiting factor embitters the grieving soul. Frustration gives way to embitterment, until the matriarch discovers the first glimmer of community: aged souls, seated around a nearby room, offering warmth to all who pass through. Enthral seeps from the beckon of the empty chair, the draw of a collective primed to talk through lingering trauma: the perfect locale for Eleanor to reminisce on those she’s lost. There’s simply one minor snag: this support group isn’t for nonspecific healing. No, its traumatic pinpoint is somewhat more specific: this is a safe space for Holocaust survivors.

As realization dawns, Eleanor does her best to retreat—and, yet, her evasions embolden those around her, convinced that Eleanor, a fellow Jewish woman of their age range, may be attempting to silence herself not by choice, but by the haunting of the horrors of her past. Unable to convince them otherwise, she devises a tale of survival, grief. It moves the group, brings Eleanor herself to tears—though critically, the story is not her own. No, the tale she tells, though steeped in truth, is that of her late friend.

In the moment, it feels but a fleeting farce. To Eleanor, the lie—as close to white as one of such delicate magnitude could be—is little more than an attempt to placate those around her, faces she believes she’ll never see again. Alas, her borrowed words swiftly begin to settle, catching the attention of newcomer Nina (Erin Kellyman), whose presence in the group belies an intention to immortalize one speaker in a college profile assignment. Eleanor, she realizes, might be the perfect subject.

So begins a waltz of heft and levity, distasteful half-truths spun of convenience as emotive authenticity underlies a genuine discussive criticality. The deeper Eleanor delves into the half-truth, the more she, and gently-leading Nina, find themselves confronting their collective grief—and seeking connection to their shared Jewish heritage. Maintaining such a balance, in which one recognizes both the protagonist’s utter inauthenticity, and the way in which the lie, in turn, can act as catalyst for genuine growth: it is skillful, deft, marking an assured directorial debut from silver-screen regular Scarlett Johansson. Stepping into the director’s chair, Johansson adapts emerging writer Tory Kamen’s semi-autobiographical script into a character piece that pulls at every heartstring. (Kamen’s grandmother, the titular Eleanor, provided the basis for the eponymous lead; though she lent quirks, personality, Kamen assures that her fibs never stretched quite so far). There is a veracity that twines through the pages: a thread of grief, seeping through the film’s every last player, anchoring the narrative in emotion rich and potent. Eleanor, grieving the loss of her best friend, laments the stories lost to illness, the twin spark to her soul. Nina, grappling with the recent loss of her own mother, struggles to connect to the father she so loves—the one who barely looks at her, for fear of recognizing features of his late wife’s face. Such reactions underlie a universal tendency to retreat, act out, in the wake of unexpected devastation: a notion that the film leans into, enhancing the relatability, the captivation of each moment, even as the descent deepens from the characters who have lost their way. So blinded by her grief, the fibs of Eleanor begin to feel not malicious, but almost desperate, pitiful: a subtle shift that humanizes the lead, providing nuance to the film’s heftier moments.

Johansson and Kamen continually make the world of New York, the lives of its inhabitants, feel so deeply lived. There is a gorgeously moving subplot in which Eleanor, spiritually inspired, decides to honour her friend’s legacy by hosting her own Bat Mitzvah. Flashes of Judaica, dedicated practice of her portion—a snapshot of the Torah that fittingly, as discussed by the Rabbi, revolves around the importance of truth; well-played, on the part of Kamen—provide a unique glimpse into the secular-tinged religiosity of an urban resident. It’s a perspective that seldom has been immortalized on screen; one that lends Eleanor’s character much-needed charm, as her initiative, dedication, and religious rediscovery endear her to the audience.

Squibb, of course, shines in a role tailored exquisitely to her every strength: ninety-five years of age, and the celebrated actress still glistens with such vivacious light, illuminating every frame with riotous heart. Charismatic from the veracious early moments, delivering each line with pitch-perfect comedic timing, she tethers a thread of levity within the weighty tapestry of grief. Her chemistry crackles with each partner with whom she shares a scene: Kellyman, in a star-making turn, most of all. The latter brings a livedness to Nina, cautious restraint belying touches of uncertainty, rage, almost, under the mask of timid confidence. Kellyman’s range is expressive, soul entirely bared, as she lays her heart upon her sleeve, beckoning audiences to glance at the world through her eyes, feel love, grief, wonder, through her soul. Together, the two elevate the effort to something truly special, providing a reminder as to the complexities of healing, and what it means to be human: imperfect, yes, but similarly trying one’s best.

There’s no question that the film, at its most surface level, centres around a condemnable decision. Over the course of the script, Eleanor’s deceptions become increasingly reprehensible; comparisons to Dear Evan Hansen (2019), uncomfortable as they may be, are, in a way, astute. Still, what sets this film apart is not the complex moral reckoning of Eleanor herself; no, there is a deeper truth withheld beneath the contemplation, a narrative urgency that posits the film as a critical addition to the cinematic canon. As the years tick on, the number of surviving Holocaust survivors continues to decline. With their loss comes, too, the forsake of their individual stories: accounts of the atrocities—and remembrances of their families—unwittingly vanished, unable to linger beyond the survivor’s own life, as Bessie laments to Eleanor, following a nightmare-stricken session of horrific reminiscence. As she mourns for her brother, her childhood, the many lives stolen by the Nazis, so, too, does she mourn their legacies, known only to her, soon to be lost to time. These stories—the narratives of the survivors; stories of resilience, reflections on the lost; cruelty wreaked by inhumanity at its darkest—they are essential components of remembrance, awareness: assurance that such tragedy may never again ensue. Yes, consent to share is vital; of that, Eleanor could learn a thing or two. Still, the sheer act of reviving a nearly-dissipated account, honouring the fallen—Bessie; her brother—immortalizes their story within the cultural consciousness: is such an act not simply noble, but, in this age, necessary? The urgency of such a message, the criticality of continuing to spread awareness, as the few remaining survivors wane with each passing day, is more vital now than ever. In its steadfast understanding of this responsibility, perhaps Eleanor the Great may be the very key to prompting such a change.

Some may call the film uncomfortable. Some might deem it saccharine. Truthfully, what makes Eleanor the Great so fascinating is the way in which Johansson deftly treads the line between the two: a curious juxtaposition, one that strikes the heart at just the perfect angle. Powerhouse performances—Squibb, uproarious with every memorable line; Kellyman, the beating heart of the effort—anchor a moral paradox that lingers far beyond the final frame. Eleanor the Great, at its core, is not a cinematic blip. No, it is an effort primed to provoke thought, impression; evocative, as its beats strike home, culminating in a well-earned moment of catharsis. Tied together with the current urgency of such a script, the film swiftly stakes out a reputation as an absolute must-see.