It is one of the most moving and remarkable films about childhood I’ve ever seen. The setting of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is as grim as it gets, but the perspective is a magical piece of cinema. Bruno is the eight-year-old son of a Nazi officer, and the curious eyes and ears of Mark Herman’s gripping story. When his father is promoted from a desk job in Berlin to commanding a death camp in the middle of nowhere, Bruno can’t fathom the sudden frosty tension between his parents, or why he is forbidden to visit the strange “farm” with the electric fences.

There’s a Swallows and Amazons innocence about Bruno’s efforts to picklock these mysteries that cuts both ways. His secret friendship with an amiable and starving Jewish boy called Shmuel on the other side of the wire has the rhythm of a children’s adventure, spiked by unspeakable adult truths. The two boys exchange tokens, play draughts and struggle to understand the prejudices and propaganda that separate them.

It’s a beautifully balanced chamber piece. The cast is terrific. David Thewlis and Vera Farmiga are wonderfully icy as the overprotective parents whose lies about the death camp are as hollow as their marriage. Their stiflingly formal dinner parties for ambitious young officers and Nazi dignitaries have a habit of turning toxic at the drop of a fork.

The relationship between Asa Butterfield’s precocious Bruno and Jack Scanlon’s gloomy Shmuel is a gawky comedy of young manners.

Despite moments of improbable whimsy, this is a hugely affecting film. Important, too. It engages with the complexity of the Holocaust in a language that can move children as profoundly as adults.

12A, 94 minutes

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