Review: The Boy in Striped Pyjamas

|PIC1|The title sounds innocuous enough but say the word 'Holocaust' and the pyjamas take on a new meaning. Mark Herman's film encounters Hitler's 'final solution' through the eyes of Bruno, an eight-year-old innocent whose SS officer father is posted to 'the country' to oversee the Fatherland's most sinister way of making 'the country strong'.

Here director Mark Herman (Little Voice, Brassed Off) has adapted a bestselling teenage novel by Irish author John Boyne. Boyne's novel relied a lot on readers looking between the lines of Bruno's limited understanding. Herman's film adaptation finds screen equivalents for this.

In the opening sequence Bruno and two young friends 'Stuka bomb' along the streets of Berlin to James Horner's playful orchestral score. They are blithely unaware as they pass a block of flats where Jewish families are being ordered at gunpoint into trucks.

Later Bruno arrives home to learn his family are leaving the city for a destination where their complicity in Nazi oppression will be laid bare. There are dissenting voices in this family, though, and Bruno, while not understanding very much, sees through the propaganda he is fed with childlike clarity. This happens as he strikes up a forbidden friendship with eight-year-old Shmuel, a Jewish boy in the prison camp his father oversees.

|PIC2|Herman draws us in to the story and the lives of his privileged characters sympathetically. He shows us Elsa and her mother-in-law's doubts and depicts Bruno's sister being drawn towards Nazism through a crush on a conflicted but handsome young lieutenant. Centrally, he portrays Bruno's growing friendship with a prisoner who is assigned as a handyman to the family (Pavel - David Hayman) and with Shmuel (Jack Scanlon). There are especially convincing performances from Asa Butterfield (Bruno), David Thewliss (Ralph) and Vera Farmiger (Elsa).

Perhaps younger audiences will find the film most convincing. Credulity is stretched at times and Bruno's naivety verges on excruciating. But when we see his final misunderstanding and his attempt to atone for an earlier betrayal of Shmuel, we are seized with a growing sense of doom. The film plunges towards a terrible conclusion and it would be hard not to be moved.

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (Cert 12A) is out in cinemas across the UK on 12 September.

Lindsay Shaw is editor of Reel Issues, Bible Society's online film and faith discussion service. Visit www.reelissues.org.uk either to download and road-test a recent film discussion or to sign up and receive a new outline every month and access a full library of archived discussions. Each outline offers a full programme for a discussion based on one of the latest popular films, helping Christians and their friends to discuss spiritual, moral and lifestyle issues.