It’s easy to have conflicting feelings about The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas because it tries to play as a light-hearted children’s fable about the Holocaust. But light-hearted isn’t really the right word, because there’s nothing “light” about either the setting or the circumstances that bring together two boys in friendship. The tone itself, even after seeing the film, is hard to fathom, as the relationship between these two boys is at once humorous and beautiful, but it’s also set against the most galling and horrific of historic events. The difficult read of the film ultimately affects how one feels about it overall, but in parts and individual scenes, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is always, at least, compelling.

Based on the novel by John Boyne, the film follows a German Commandant (David Thewlis) as he’s reassigned from his post in Berlin to a Nazi Death Camp. He brings along his family; wife Elsa (Vera Farmiga), daughter Gretel (Amber Beattie) and son Bruno (Asa Butterfield), and they live in an estate on the edge of the camp. Bruno, an avid reader of adventure books and budding explorer, investigates his surroundings and comes across the fenceline of the camp and makes friends with the little boy (Jack Scanlon) playing there. Despite his worn look and “stripped pyjamas,” Bruno thinks the camp is a farm, and the funny smelling smoke is from the burning of “rubbish,” so says his father. But Bruno’s innocent world begins to collapse as his father’s true work behind the fence is revealed to his shocked family.

Our first encounter with a Jewish person in the film is Pavel (David Hayman), a former doctor that now works as a domestic servant in the family’s home. In the initial scene, he drops off food in the kitchen and Bruno notices the cuffs of his striped pants beneath his work clothes. The shot is set up in such a way that you’re supposed to suspect that things are not as they seem; as if we don’t already know the iconography of the Holocaust. In fact there seems to be a lot of that in this movie. Now maybe that’s because this is supposed to be from the family’s perspective, and they apparently have no idea, but their ignorance wore on me. There are only so many times that Bruno can talk to Shmuel about doing things that little boys usually do together without Bruno catching on that there’s something fishy afoot.

However, that innocence also works in the film’s favour at times. The friendship between the boys feels genuine, even though there are times when even Shmuel seems like he wants to use what little strength he has to beat some sense into Bruno; maybe that’s just what it’s like when you have a friend that’s a little dense. Regardless, the way the two boys work together helps you buy the film’s tragic crescendo despite the back-handed inference that you can only learn a potent lesson in basic morality when you personally suffer because of it. But the central conceit that the kids get it, how stupid it is to hate for basically no reason, comes through loud and clear.

But there are really not that many subtle complexities at work in this film. Thewlis does his best to make an even hand out of his character, but you have to admit it’s hard to be sympathetic to the commander of Auschwitz. And beating him by far on the creep-o-meter is Gretel’s unhealthy fascination with one of her father’s underlings, which drives her to abandon her doll collection and cover her bedroom wall with Nazi propaganda posters and press clippings. A nice touch was in showing the mother visibly distraught when she finds out that the black smoke in the air is coming from room-sized crematoriums filled with Jews, even if hindsight says her naivety must have been questionable at best.

But the real conflict of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is how does it rectify the two distinct personae in its storytelling? The cage-rattling conclusion is pretty potent enough, and considering how it ends, it had better. I thought the two kids were good, but the stuff involving the adults around them just didn’t coalesce the same. The film probably would have been improved had it been told entirely from the kids’ perspective, thus making the gullibility seem less glaring. Still, it’s a fascinating story and well shot and paced for being a potent mix of horror and innocence.