‘It will always be less hellish than the reality’: why cinema keeps returning to the Holocaust

Three new films attempt to address the Holocaust. But can cinema ever hope to adequately confront humanity’s darkest chapter?

Cinema has a troubled relationship with the Holocaust. It is repeatedly drawn to the subject, which seems to offer a shortcut to moral gravity, emotional depth and the highest possible stakes – elements every storyteller yearns for – and yet there is so much that can go wrong.

For one thing, the very act of depicting the horror of the Nazi murder of 6 million Jews risks minimising it. To pick one crude example, no matter how extreme a diet an actor might undertake, they can never resemble the Muselmänner, the walking skeletons who populated the death camps. Whatever can be shown on screen will always be less hellish than the reality.