The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (Mark Herman, 2008)

John Boyne, the writer of this depiction of the Holocaust from the perspective of a concentration camp commandant's family, has reiterated the oft-used rationale that what went on in Nazi Germany needs to be told and retold for successive generations, 'lest we forget'.
Although burdened with the baggage of that familiarity, Herman's film nevertheless manages a certain freshness through making the focal point the friendship between the camp commandant's 8-year-old son and a camp inmate of the same age, and the story arc becomes both the boy's dawning discomfort with what is actually going on, from a state of utter innocence where he only wonders why the sickly farmers next door all wear pyjamas, and the parallel disintegration of his idyllic Nazi family.
This could all be insufferably twee, but a combination of deft script and wholly natural performances from the two boys, backed up by David Thewlis as the fanatical father and Vera Farmiga as the model mother gradually forced to confront the nightmare, keeps it compelling. A slight pity then, that some authenticity is once again lost through the imposition of an English language and culture filter on a tale very much in need of its actual historical milieu.

6/10