Based on the best-selling children's book by John Boyne, director Mark Herman (Brassed Off, Little Voice) pulls us into the wartime world of eight-year-old Bruno (Asa Butterfield), son of a Nazi commandant (Harry Potter's David Thewlis), whose friendship with a young Jewish boy, Schmuel, forms the backbone of the film.

Set in Germany during the Holocaust, Bruno and his family move out of Berlin to an isolated country dwelling so his father can fulfill his duties to the Fatherland -which, we soon discover, includes overseeing the running of the nearby concentration camp that the curious Bruno can see from his bedroom window.

Mistaking it for a farm and not able to comprehend the terrible events going on around him, Bruno's childhood innocence lends a heart-breaking sincerity to the film, for even if he doesn't realise where the story is going, we the audience sadly do.

Making us see things through Bruno's eyes, however, works on two levels. Written with the intention of introducing a younger generation to the horrors of the Nazis' Final Solution, the character of Bruno represents anyone learning about these events for the first time; his simplistic, childish questions and observations are what you would expect from a naïve young boy, while for older viewers, the touching poignancy of his words and actions only serves to heighten the certain agony at the heart of the story.

So too are the touching and even funny scenes between Bruno and Pavel, a Jewish man who is a servant to Bruno's family, played by the wonderful David Hayman of Trial and Retribution fame.

But it's not just Bruno who is misled; his mother, played by Vera Farmiga (The Departed) is at first - and perhaps even deliberately so - ignorant to her husband's 'business', but even she comes to doubt the ideologies of Hitler's Third Reich when its bleak consequences literally arrive on her doorstep.