The central tension of the film Sarah’s Key, based on the novel by Tatiana De Rosnay, is a harrowing image. During World War II, French officials collaborating with the Nazis arrive at the home of a Jewish family. Sarah (Mélusine Mayance), a precocious and loyal little girl, believes she is thinking fast and making a brave decision when she denies that her little brother is home. Instead, she locks him in a secret closet in the apartment and pockets the key. Little does she know, the family is about to hauled off to a weeks-long incarceration, first in horrendous conditions at a local sports arena and then in a containment camp in the French countryside. Sarah’s mother and father are eventually hauled off to a death camp in Germany, while Sarah tries to escape and get back to her brother who, as far as we know, is still locked in the tiny closet in their Parisian apartment.

That situation, enough to induce nausea for the better part of the movie’s first hour, dangles over the entirety of the movie Sarah’s Key, and we wait with cautious optimism that it will somehow be resolved – and soon – to relieve the agitated tension. While we wait, watching Sarah make her way through the dark adventure, the movie flashes forward to the current day in which journalist Julia Jarmond (Kristin Scott Thomas) is researching the very same story. She is working on a magazine article about French complicity in the atrocities of the holocaust, and during her research, she discovers that her in laws’ apartment is the very same one that was once the home of Sarah’s family. This discovery abruptly makes the crimes of history feel very intimate indeed.

In its exploration of historical guilt, Sarah’s Key is neither novel nor especially profound, but coming at the holocaust from a French perspective, it certainly manages to push some buttons. Through the film we are introduced to the oft-forgotten subplot of the Second World War: the complicity of part of conquered Europe in the Nazi crimes. It is a guilt which isn’t reserved to merely those countries that took part. Rather, by showing a tendency to submit moral judgment to political authority, Sarah’s Key points its admonishing finger not at the French, but at human nature.

Sarah’s Key’s real strength, however, lies in its sweeping historical storytelling, which holds us rapt and emotionally involved, thanks to two great performances by the female leads. There is Sarah’s story, and her’s central horror, but Julia’s story becomes just as intriguing. While working on her article, she discovers that she is pregnant, yet her husband doesn’t want the baby. The choice of whether or not to keep the in utero child forges a deep emotional connection to the subjects of her story. In the context of Sarah’s story, life’s preciousness is magnified.