In Extras, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s television series, Kate Winslet appeared as a cynical version of herself, playing a nun in a Holocaust film. Praised for tackling such an important topic, she confesses that it’s a sure way to win an Oscar. And about the Holocaust itself, Winslet says with a ironic rise of her eyebrows: “We get it, it was grim, move on.”

A similar weariness came over me while watching the director Stephen Daldry and the screenwriter David Hare’s adaptation of Bernhard Schlink’s novel The Reader. Do we really need to go back one more time to the Holocaust and explore post-war German guilt? Don’t we have enough contemporary horrors of our own to attract film-makers?

Strictly speaking, The Reader is not another Holocaust movie. It’s written from the point of view of a perpetrator, not of the victims — or, at least not of the traditional victims (the Jews). In fact, the book/film has created a new class of Holocaust victims: the post-war baby-boomers of Germany.

The Reader is a look at the emotional and psychological damage done to a generation who, in the 1960s, woke up to the war crimes of their parents. (The Germans even have a therapeutic-sounding term for this struggle to come to terms with the past: Vergangenheitsbewältigung.) The film poses the question: how do we react to those we love when we discover their dirty secrets?

That is the question that haunts the lawyer Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes), who had an affair with an attractive older woman, Hanna (Winslet), when he was a 15-year-old schoolboy.

The film flashes back in time to when the young Michael (David Kross) is suddenly taken ill on the street and Hanna takes him to her flat, tidies him up, then takes him home. Later, Michael returns to her flat to thank her and secretly watches Hanna as she puts on her stockings. The sexual fuse is lit and they become lovers. After school, he goes to her dingy flat and a ritual evolves where he, at her request, reads books to her — Homer, Chekhov, Lawrence — then they have sex.

What, you may wonder, does Hare and Daldry’s film provide the viewer with that Schlink’s novel can’t give to a reader? Answer: naked flesh. Lots of it. Genuine, prime, movie-star flesh, courtesy of Winslet and her young co-star. The trouble is that when you strip a star, you strip away their character. The illusion is shattered — however temporarily — and we’re left in the dark, thinking about Winslet’s naked body.

I appreciate that the lovers’ physical intimacy is there to highlight their lack of personal intimacy, but the film doesn’t have to be so distractingly explicit. I’m sure the makers’ thinking was that, while this may be gratuitous nudity, it’s nudity with gravitas. For this is a serious film about Nazism, guilt and redemption. Here are mammaries for the high-minded, bottoms for highbrows. So, those in the back of the cinema, stop looking at Winslet’s nipples! For God’s sake, those are Nazi nipples — as the young Michael eventually discovers to his horror.

One day, Hanna suddenly disappears from Michael’s life. Years later, as a law student, he is taken to a trial of female SS prison guards and finds Hanna in the dock. He also discovers her other shameful secret, and how her embarrassment about this one leads her to accept sole blame for one particularly hideous crime.

Here’s the most curious thing about this film: Hare’s screenplay appears to have no interest in the fact that, by concealing the second of Hanna’s secrets from the court, Michael allows the other SS guards charged with war crimes to get off with lighter sentences than she does. He is, inadvertently, a Nazi collaborator.

Instead, the film portrays Michael as the victim of the story. As a young man, we see him traumatised by the discovery that he was in love with a Nazi. The adult Michael, wracked with guilt and shame, can’t open up to the people in his life. Yet he has the cheek to go and see an actual survivor of the Holocaust (Lena Olin). She refuses him the easy redemption — and understanding of Hanna — that he longs for. “Go to theatre if you want catharsis,” she says. “Go to literature. Don’t go to the camps. Nothing comes out of the camps.”

The performances have that solid, well-crafted delivery you’d expect from a film by Stephen Daldry. Fiennes is perfect as the adult Michael, his sad face quietly signalling the dull drizzle of his perpetual pain. And Kross has the attractive wholesomeness of a young Michael York. There is nothing exceptional, however, and that includes Winslet’s competent but never commanding performance.

The Reader raises interesting questions about our ability to understand and forgive. And, to its credit, the film admits that it doesn’t really have many answers (although the connection it makes between books and moral literacy is somewhat fatuous).

Its main problem is that it simply fails to come alive dramatically. We never really get to know these characters and come to care for them. They are generic figures — young man in love, beautiful woman with a secret. The film never shows us what is lovable about Hanna, so we cannot share Michael’s ambiguity about her and thus care about her fate. Despite being a love story, The Reader is a cold, cerebral work, a moral debate dolled up in the fancy dress of film.

15, 124 mins

Editor's choice

• The super cool Vampire Weekend
• Streep and Baldwin get complicated
• Guy Ritchie on Sherlock Holmes