Film

The central idea of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas—a child’s naive view of the horrors of the Holocaust—forces viewers into a constant awareness of the distance between what they know and what little Bruno (Butterfield) understands. When his Nazi-officer father (Thewlis, exuding a slimy mix of bureaucratic officiousness and underlying sadism) is transferred from Berlin to an undefined job in the country, Bruno worries about being lonely. He’s excited when he spies some sort of “farm” from his bedroom window, though he’s puzzled as to why all the farmers wear those funny striped pajamas. Adventurous lad that he is, Bruno sneaks off the fenced-in grounds of the house and heads over to the farm, where he forms a strange friendship with Shmuel (Scanlon), a boy behind the barbed-wire fence.

Though Bruno can’t work out why Shmuel is so unhappy, we know, and the film relishes rubbing our noses in the irony. Bruno’s mother (Farmiga) gradually works out what happens at the camp, and we get to watch her break down as her casual anti-Semitism comes into conflict with her basic moral goodness. Mark Herman (Brassed Off, Little Voice) knows how to milk the melodrama from every scene, but viewers may feel a little icky about the experience.