Based on the book by Irish novelist John Boyne

What is about?

It is a fictitious story about an 8-year-old German boy named Bruno, whose father is called up to manage a concentration camp.  He justifies it by saying to himself, ‘he is just a soldier’. However, he is just ‘a manager’. He doesn’t actually do any of the actual gassing and ‘jew baiting’, still highly unpleasant though.

The boy is miles from anywhere, and he doesn’t have anyone to play with. Like all little boys, he is slightly mischievous and decides to explore the local area where he shouldn’t. He comes across the edges of the concentration camp and finds a Jewish boy of his age in the concentration camp. The boy is wearing striped pyjamas which he doest understand’

Neither the Jewish boy nor, indeed, Bruno has any idea of the sheer brutalness of the final solution, so as boys do, they play together, separated by a barbed wire fence.

And the story unfolds. . . .

And I will not reveal any more of the plot.

What did I think about?

It made all the characters extremely ‘normal’. Apart from one Lieutenant who was aggressive, but not over the top, they were all people you could relate to. When I was young, there was a documentary called ‘The World at War’ where all Nazis were monsters. What the people who ran the camp did was inhumane, but they had wives and children. They were mostly people, though, which I think is essential.

Would I recommend it?

I would definitely recommend it. It shows the mundane nature of Evil, the casualness of it all. These camps divided the tasks of the gas chambers into parts.  It was mundane; it was like a factory.  Of course, it would be more suitable to antisemites, but  the division of labour made it manageable.

Finally it wasn’t a ridiculously long film. Since the Lord Of The Rings films there has a tendency to make films ridiculously long. It was a pleasant sit.

Rating 9/10