City of life and death/Nanjing! Nanjing!

Directed by Lu Chuan. Starring Liu Ye, Gao Yuanyuan, 15A cert, IFI/Light House/Screen, Dublin, 135 min

AN EARLY episode of the legendary documentary series The World at Wartouched on the notorious massacre of (figures are still disputed) several hundred thousand Chinese citizens by the Japanese at Nanking in 1937. Lawrence Olivier, the series' narrator, allowed a flicker of the blackest amusement into his voice as he whispered: "Even the Nazis were shocked."

There are obvious dangers in approaching such harrowing material. Focus too closely and too frequently on the slaughter and you risk dallying in the pornography of atrocity: each mass rape or act of genocide must, to avoid inducing torpor, be that bit more ghastly than the one that precedes it. On the other hand, treat the massacres in too coy a fashion and you may trivialise or sentimentalise the material.

This long, elegantly shot film manages to strike the balance between those two extremes. Filmed in worthy, serious black and white, City of Life and Deathis unlikely to be confused with an art film. It is closer to the accessible atrocities of Schindler's List than to, say, the nihilistic hopelessness of a genuinely horrific war film such as Elem Klimov's Come and See. But its anger and passion are quite overpowering.

The film begins with a lengthy, deliberately messy action sequence following the Japanese as they consolidate their hold on the ancient Chinese capital. The home army is captured and, in a series of biblically appalling passages, unsparingly put to death: some are driven into the sea, some buried alive, some burnt in squalid shacks.

It is only then that we begin to connect with the key characters in the story. Kadokawa (Hideo Nakaizumi) is a Japanese soldier who begins to have doubts about the morality of his mission. John Paisley plays John Rabe, the German who made valiant attempts to save the civilian population. Tang (Fan Wei) is his assistant.

The film will remind many of last year's fine Katyn, Andrzej Wajda study of the 1940 Russian massacre of Polish officers, but Lu Chuan's film does an even better job of integrating the private (intersecting character arcs) with the public (the ever accelerating slaughter).

If the film has a flaw, it is its unwillingness to ask “why?” Still, if it sends viewers running from the credits to the history books, then that is an achievement in itself.