The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas(12A)

The putative "innocence" of children is examined from a different angle in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.

The prospect of Disney sponsoring this adaptation of John Boyne's 2006 Holocaust novel made me queasy, but writer-director Mark Herman has done a creditable job of negotiating its volatile compound of fable and realism. Eight-year-old Bruno (Asa Butterfield) reluctantly moves with his family from Berlin to a remote country estate after his father (David Thewlis) is promoted. That promotion – to commandant of a concentration camp – is a development the book can withhold for longer than the explicit imagery of film allows, though Bruno's misperception of the new circumstances is subtly handled. The workers in striped clothes he spots from his window are "farmers", he believes, though he cannot explain the awful smell from the nearby chimneys.

Curiosity and boredom lead Bruno to investigate beyond the garden walls, and he strikes up a kind of friendship with a haunted-looking boy his own age, Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), through the electrified fence. Sensing the violation of realism here – in all likelihood children entering a camp would have been exterminated immediately; there's also an absence of guards and watchtowers – Herman divides the burden of ignorance with Bruno's mother, brilliantly played by Vera Farmiga, who has assumed that the adjacent buildings are a labour camp. She discovers the murderous secret via a chance remark. We find incredible those stories of Germans who claimed not to know what was going on. Farmiga's portrayal of horrified enlightenment outlines the elements that constituted "not knowing"; not just wilful blindness, but an inability to believe that one's husband could be abetting genocide.

In truth, it is the mother's flawed comprehension of evil that feels more interesting than the boy's, which at times steers the mood towards the tragic-whimsical nonsense of Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful. Would a child really imagine that the starved, bruised inmates of a camp are part of a "game"? Would he really not smell the death and decay around him? Bruno actually does enter the adult world of deceit when, in a moment of fear, he betrays Shmuel in front of a Nazi officer. That's when the film comes closest to discrediting the old myth of natural innocence. The truism runs that a child accepts life as it is because it's all he knows. Not true. What this film can't quite admit is that childhood isn't just about what one knows – it's also about what one suspects.