DIRECTOR Stephen Daldry’s film “The Reader” earned Kate Winslet an Oscar. He’s nominated again this year with this one. It’s not an easy read. But it’s undeniably challenging.

Oskar (Thomas Horn), nine years old, emotionally shattered by his father’s death on 9/11, searches New York for the lock fitting the key he finds a year later in his father’s room.

Oskar is the film’s central thread, in almost every scene. It’s a powerful performance of a child whom we first come to evaluate as a precocious, paranoid prat.

Sandra Bullock plays Oskar’s mother, reinforcing her shift from light comedy to serious drama, at which she proves to be good. Australian Zoe Caldwell is Oskar’s grandmother living across the air-shaft. Tom Hanks is the father who worked hard to make life an exciting journey for Oskar.

The film’s real star alongside Thomas Horn is Max von Sydow, playing a man who has no name and does not speak but patiently mentors Oskar’s journey through awful anguish. It’s bravura acting underpinning a story that inevitably comes to resolution, perhaps a little mawkishly but nevertheless credible and of merit.

At all cinemas