In Mark Herman‘s adaptation of John Boyne‘s controversial children‘s bestseller offering a kid‘s-eye view of Holocaust, the young eight-year-old Bruno (Asa Butterfield) has the wide, blue-eyed innocence of the unprotected. Sheltered and half in a fantasy world, he runs through city streets with his friends, his arms outstretched like wings, gliding untouched through the busy and congested world of adults. Herman bathes these opening scenes in a fantastic fairy-tale burnish, like a golden world ready to be lost.

Bruno shares a family dinner with his loving parents (Vera Farmiga and David Thewlis) and his older sister Gretel (Amber Beattie). With their sparkling British Masterpiece Theatre accents, the family appears as well-scrubbed paragons of British banality. (Even Richard Johnson, that great bastion of British nobility from the epics of the 1960s, is exhumed to appear as the family‘s Grandpa.) So it comes as a shock when Thewlis dons a German commandant‘s uniform for a going-away party and Herman quietly reveals that the Dad has been reassigned, taking the family with him. As Dad remarks, "Home is where the family is." In this case, however, home is Auschwitz and Dad is the new camp commandant, who will be supervising the mass exterminations.

The family arrives at its new home, an imposing, Godless mansion, and dark smoke from the Auschwitz furnaces billows in the background. Herman frames this detail matter-of-factly, as one more image in the composition, trying to place the point-of-view somewhat from Bruno‘s perspective, which, as the film progresses, becomes trickier and trickier to maintain.

That‘s especially so when Bruno, being taught blatant hate from a rabid, though coolly controlled, anti-Semitic tutor, is told, "I think, Bruno, if you ever found a nice Jew, you would be the greatest explorer in the world." At that point, Bruno has already found his "nice Jew," another eight-year-old boy, Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), a b