Movie Review: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (2008)
Shot mostly in Hungary, by relatively unknown production crews, this is a late-to-air show as far as I’m aware given that it was made in 2008 and only premiered on Australian TV the other day.
Without being too cliche, this film is about a little German boy who decides it’d be fun to play Jew for a day. Unfortunately he picks the time they’re all dragged off and gassed. Sounds fucked up, right? That’s the tip of the ice berg.
The narrative addresses the innocence of youth, has the typical cliche fish out of water scenario of an isolated German boy who’s daddy is a soldier who runs ‘the farm’ out the back, where ‘strange people’ who ‘wear their pajamas all day’ lurk. It focuses in on the bond that the boy makes with one of these strange pajama wearing people, and whilst the big sister acts as a narratological mechanism to burst the bubble it really does make the entire show more chilling seeing it through the eyes of an innocent young kid.
I’m afraid I blew the ending in the first paragraph, but at the same time it’s pretty much predictable as fuck. There’s nothing new here, but it still creeps the fuck out of me the way it was depicted through a kids eyes. It was pretty gripping stuff.
6/10.
