It's another look at the Holocaust, this time seen through the eyes of an eight-year-old boy, the son of a Nazi officer who is promoted to a post that uproots his family from their patrician life in Berlin and carries them to an isolated country home from which he presides over a concentration camp.
From his sheltered upbringing, the boy tries to make sense of the events unfolding in the world around him and struggles to maintain his love for his father as the inhumanity of war and of the Nazi view strains the very bonds of family.
The film is not exceedingly graphic, most of its violence is implied, making it easier to watch without cringing. Still, what's suggested, along with our knowledge of the actual horrors of the Nazi 'purification of the Fatherland' provides much of the emotional strength needed to connect all the dots.
While I understand the inhibition many feel about seeing films that examine the Holocaust and revisiting its horrors, still, and this film is a potent example, there are many stories to be told. This one reflects both on the inhumanity wreaked upon its victims and more centrally, the dehumanizing effects upon its perpetrators.
The questions it asks about 'how far along will you participate with the corrupting influences of social injustice' are questions that each of the main characters struggles with. The film doesn't necessarily explore the underpinnings of the pre-war German psyche that laid the foundations for the rise of Nazi ideology, but instead deals with its (then) contemporaneous ramifications.
Underneath it all, the characters are human with qualities both good and bad. Any honest individual can recognize something of themselves in each and that's what gives the film its emotional weight.
I wonder whether some would regard this telling of the Holocaust story, by showing the humanness of its non-Jewish German characters is too sympathetic to them. I would argue that the moral dilemmas each character faces are not unlike those we all face at many points in our lives - how to stand up against what's wrong in the world. As such, those issues are, in many respects universal, and go to the root of the powerlessness we feel to resist the world's many injustices.
In the films of my youth that depicted that era, Nazis and Germans in general were painted with a broader brush. We were the good guys, they were the bad. But it was that ability to categorize entire populations that allowed the Germans to demonize the Jews. In our current era, it continues to allow people to demonize and dehumanize entire populations with horrific consequences.
This fictional account of a Holocaust story is as true today as ever it was imagined.
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