Two boys, one always in striped pajamas

Bruno, on the other hand, reaches out to another flesh-and-blood boy - a weak, starving Jew named Shmuel (Jack Scanlon) - talking through the barbed-wire electrical fence that encloses the camp. Bruno, by his ignorance and innocence, becomes as much a victim of his father's epic malfeasance as the Jews sent to the camp to starve, to die.

The simple genius of Boyne's story, and Herman's adaptation, is that Bruno, his sister and his mother don't know what transpires at the camp a few miles from their house, separated by a dense copse of trees. Bruno thinks it's a farm, finding it only slightly peculiar that the "farmers" wear striped pajamas - occasionally one is sent over to peel potatoes, or scrub the floors.

Gretel, a budding member of Hitler's youth movement with a crush on her father's young aide (Rupert Friend), buys into the propaganda, the strident anti-Semitism. She wonders what's responsible for the awful smell, the ash blowing from the smokestacks, but isn't curious enough to investigate. And the wife just believes that her husband runs a work camp. That is what her husband has told her. Indeed, that is all he can say.

is a British production, and consequently its cast - all of them portraying Germans - speak in English accents. This includes Farmiga, the American, doing English, doing German (quite convincingly). Such formality takes the film another step away from hard reality and into the realm of fable, of storytelling. But it also makes the film's final sequences all the more jolting and horrifying by contrast.