A movie like this, with all its heavy-handed symbolism, high-minded and uninmpeachable moralising and the way in which it goes too far to make a point that only Holocaust deniers and Neo-Nazis will deny, is little more than emotional porn. It gives viewers a cheap, easy high of horror, pity and indignation without any sort of narrative rigour or deeper context.

When young Bruno's Nazi military officer father is transferred to a post in the countryside, a posting we are told little about and which Bruno's grandmother reacts to with horror, it's no surprise when we gradually learn that he's been put in charge of a concentration camp for Jews. What follows is a study in stereotypes. There's the cold-hearted, play-it-by-the-rulebook father, the conscience-stricken mother who is unable to live with what her husband is doing, the annoying older sibling who is starstruck by the visions of Nazi glory given to her by their self-righteous tutor and a handsome, coldly sadistic junior officer who turns out to have a dissident father who has fled to Switzerland, the pretty young nanny, the broken, yet dignified and helpful Jewish servant, the dunderheaded grandfather who supports it all in the interest of glory to the Fatherland - these characters have been doodled in with a crayon rather than sketched with any kind of nuance. Only Bruno, who would rather read tales of adventure than boring Nazi propaganda, and Schmuel, the 'boy in the striped pyjamas', the Jewish prisoner whom he sneaks out to meet and befriend, come to life in any way, and this is in large part due to the respective actors' performances.

This kind of subject matter is best treated with a certain subtlety and restraint. But Herman, whose previous triumphs include the snoozefest 'Little Voice', goes for it with the zest of a mad scientist performing brain surgery with a hacksaw. How unsubtle is this film? Well, as the climax drawn near, stormclouds gather and there are well-timed roars of thunder to underscore the unfolding horror. I kid you not.
We have sinister, leering Nazi officers, incredibly noble and sad Jewish prisoners and women driven to sorrow and anger by what their men are doing (women are just so much more sensitive, you know). In a fantastically unsubtle scene of foreshadowing allusion, after Bruno's sister falls under the sway of Nazi propaganda, Bruno finds her old dolls discarded in the basement like so many tiny infant cadavers. There's a very thin line to cross over into bad taste here, one that this movie has no qualms crossing. The main merit of this film is in the performance of the two little boys who play Bruno and Schmuel. The relationship between them becomes believable and affecting despite the incredibly inept way in which it is dealt with, and despite the director's determination to submerge the emotional core of the film by trotting out his little army of stereotypes.

Without explicitly giving away the ending, I have to say that this movie could have had the same emotional impact without reducing one of the most ghastly facts of 20th century history to another spectacle to be recreated on the big screen. Also, I have very little patience for movies that try to tug at the heartstrings and win sympathy the easy way by endangering children or small, fluffy animals. At least the small, fluffy animals are spared here.

All in all, moves like this make me feel it's time people stopped trying to make heavy-handed and obvious commentaries on morality and human nature by making up stories about past wars, least of all the second world war, the last war where the dominant western cultures could claim to have been the good guys (although even this claim is a bit of a stretch at times). Perhaps this movie, with its British actors and British accents could have been about the UK's opportunistic support of Bush's war on terror, or, if it had to be about something from the past, the Falklands war. How many films have been made about that? I'm sure there are lots of telling moral fables to be found there without trotting out the same old Nazi boogeymen.