Hanna (Kate Winslet, left) romances private school student Michael Berg (David Kross) after the Second World War in Stephen Daldry's film adaptation of the best-selling novel The Reader. (Melinda Sue Gordon/Weinstein Company)

Nazis are everywhere this season — in Defiance, Valkyrie and The Reader. Surely this cinematic mining of old atrocities is some effort to make sense of present violence in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, parts of Africa. Maybe more contemporary filmmakers should be confronting contemporary mayhem, but The Reader, at least, demonstrates that there’s power in a backward glance held steady and unblinking.

The most terrifying fact of the Holocaust is its banality. Kate Winslet's character is not a monster — or rather, not only a monster — but a woman with a capacity to feel, to see beauty, to be moved.

The film is a well-bred adaptation of the bestselling novel by Bernhard Schlink. The phrase “coming of age story” connotes a gentle blooming, but in The Reader, adulthood slams like an 18-wheeler into a young German named Michael Berg (David Kross). In 1958, he is 15 years old. Walking home from school one day, he suddenly grows ill, vomiting and swooning in the street from scarlet fever. The boy is discovered and delivered home by a streetcar ticket-taker with a face as set and hard as the clicking heels of her sensible shoes. Her name is Hanna (Kate Winslet), but Michael only discovers this upon his fourth visit to her apartment after he’s recovered. It turns out that distant, unyielding Hanna makes a great first lover, and the two fall into a genuinely erotic affair, a rarity in Hollywood these days.

The sex is great, and both are quietly fascinated by the class differences between them — a hardworking girl in a drab flat and the rich boy in his private school uniform. But it’s really literature that draws them together. She wants him to read to her: Chekhov, Mark Twain, D.H. Lawrence and Homer’s Odyssey, the latter a pronouncement that Michael is on a lifelong journey forever defined by this early relationship.

After a smouldering summer together, Hanna vanishes. Six years later, Michael sees her again, but she doesn’t see him. He is in a courtroom gallery watching his former lover stand trial for murders dating back to her time as a guard at Auschwitz. The 20 years that divide them make for a pivotal historical gap: one generation is (potentially) actively guilty, and the other, guilty by association. Michael is now a law student taking a seminar in German guilt; Hanna is his assignment, as it were. Sickened by what he didn’t know, Michael observes her case under the tutelage of a watchful professor (Bruno Ganz), who answers every question with a question.

Such a state of confusion seems the only appropriate response to the story at hand. Director Stephen Daldry made another formidable novel, The Hours, into a strong film; both scripts were written by David Hare. This adaptation is equally polished, at times to a blinding glare. The Hare-Daldry union seems to breed films so precise and clean in both language and look that things can feel a little too pristine; cold, even. The structure here is unwieldy, too, grinding gears between the long-ago past, the late ’80s and 1995.

Michael (David Kross, left) is unaware of Hanna's involvement in the Holocaust in The Reader. (Melinda Sue Gordon/Weinstein Company)

But the acting is sublime. Grown Michael is a wealthy lawyer with a semi-estranged daughter; he has become as haunted and isolated as Hanna ever was. Ralph Fiennes takes over the role, and he does well with this particular kind of fragile damage. Michael’s morality is twisted into knots: as a young man watching the trial, he knows a piece of information about Hanna that could affect her prison sentence. But he also knows that she’s guilty of something. His lifelong internal struggle comes to mirror Hanna’s: When is inaction a crime? What exactly is the greater good?

Then again, perhaps Hanna doesn’t struggle at all with culpability, and this chilling possibility is well played by Winslet, who controls the film beautifully. Her Hanna is not going to drown in guilt, or enact a simple redemption — though she is constantly washing herself, as if attempting to scrub away markings of her failings.

The most terrifying fact of the Holocaust is, as has been said so many times, its banality. Hanna is not a monster — or rather, not only a monster — but a woman with a capacity to feel, to see beauty, to be moved. During her affair with Michael, the two take a bicycle ride through the countryside. Hanna stops in a church and listens to the children’s choir rehearsing; she weeps with emotion. Only later do we learn that she may have been responsible for the murder of hundreds of Jewish women, who died in another church during the war.

Were those tears of regret? Perhaps not. When the angry judge asks Hanna why she led the women on death marches and left the church locked while Jews burned, she appears baffled. We were, she says, doing our jobs. “What would you have done?” she asks the court. It’s Michael’s privilege, born 20 years later, never to have to answer that question himself, and it’s his burden to ask it.

In a film that is unabashedly complex, the one certainty offered is that history must be passed from generation to generation. The oppressive propriety of young Michael’s dinner table – where his father glares everyone into silence and submission – is another kind of murder. In the end, it is a memoir of a mother and daughter who survived the Holocaust that indicts Hanna in the courtroom; a book is her undoing and later, books become her only freedom. But does she deserve freedom, even if it’s of the mind and not the body? Michael isn’t so sure.

When the older Michael ends up in the New York living room of a Holocaust survivor (played with wonderful ferocity by Lena Olin, who has the misfortune of spending an earlier scene under unconvincing aging makeup), he recounts his relationship with Hanna, and his shame. “I never told anyone,” he says finally, and Fiennes’ face is overtaken by a vivid rush of relief. It is not enough, of course. But the telling is, at least, at last, some kind of action.

The Reader opens Dec. 12.

Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.