Jessica Chastain’s Antonina Zabiński is “a magician” with animals in Niki Caro’s tidy Holocaust drama. When her husband’s Warsaw Zoo is bombed, it’s unsparingly brutal; bloodied polar bears are left slumped over rocks, a slain bison is lowered into a pit. A visit from Hitler’s head zoologist, Lutz Heck (Daniel Brühl, deliciously creepy as the animal eugenics enthusiast), confirms the destroyed zoo must be liquidated for the war effort, though Zabiński and her husband convince him to let them convert it into a pig farm and then smuggle some 300 Jews into safekeeping under his nose.

Whether she’s up to her elbows in elephant gunk helping to resuscitate a newborn or snuggling with lion cubs, Antonina’s animal-loving tendencies don’t discriminate between species. It’s odd, then, that the film draws explicit parallels between the zoo’s caged stock and the Jewish women and children she eventually hides from the Nazis in her basement (“a human zoo,” she ponders softly while I sighed aloud in the cinema). Caro floods the film’s frames with light, resulting in a film far prettier than expected, but more sanitised too.