This slow-moving, nearly three-hour, widescreen adaptation of Jerzy Kosiński's World War II novel is the rare contemporary feature shot on black-and-white 35 mm film, with all that format's depth and luminosity. It is a gorgeous, ambitious film that, like the book, follows a middle-class boy (Jewish, it is suggested, though he is often mistaken as Roma) who is sent from an unnamed east European city to his aunt in the country. After the aunt dies, the boy, Joska, wanders the hinterland, encountering harrowing violence via a series of characters whose names become the film's structuring chapters: the bird keeper Lech, the peasant Labina, the farmer Garbos.

This violence makes The Painted Bird difficult to adapt. Kosiński writes of atrocities with such grotesque detail that it would be unethical, if not impossible, for any film to reconstruct them—let alone one aspiring to such wide distribution. But this is a faithful adaptation: a pit teeming with hungry rats in the book is a pit teeming with hungry rats in the film. Václav Marhoul also preserves Kosiński's matter-of-fact depiction of rural superstition, evoking Andrei Tarkovskii (Ivan's Childhood, 1962), and František Vláčil. Shot in high angle, blonde hair glowing as if from within, Labina (Júlia Vidrnáková) recalls no one as much as another Slovak actress: Magda Vášáryová playing Marketa Lazarová.

There are many such references here, from the film's opening homage to Jan Němec's Diamonds of the Night (1964), tracking Joska running through a forest from cruel village boys, to a moment when he's framed against a blown-out window, overlooking a scene of rubble, like Edmund in Germany, Year Zero (1948). Lest we think this coincidence, Aleksei Kravchenko, the star of another iconic film about children in war, Elem Klimov's Come and See (1985), plays the gentle Red Army soldier Gavrila. Kravchenko is one of several marquee actors (Udo Kier, Stellan Skarsgård, Harvey Keitel) in The Painted Bird, which does not wear its ambition to be a Big Film lightly. Beyond its gestures to postwar art cinema, this is a war movie, with second and third units, surplus military vehicles, a stunt team—all of a piece for Marhoul, an army reservist who last made the big-budget Tobruk (1967), and who has expressed dismay that Czech cinema has not managed to regain its 1960s luster. Marhoul is not the only one to feel this way, and The Painted Bird, built to order, is an enormous success: the first Czech film in competition at Venice in decades, it is now even available as an audiobook.

It is quite a soundtrack, with dialogue in Interslavic, used because, like Kosiński, Marhoul did not want to blame the savagery on any one people. But this is not the film's only language. Soviet soldiers speak Russian, Nazi soldiers speak German—and Joska speaks Czech. The linguistic difference makes sense—like the film's avian namesake, Joska is a “changeling”—but it also exempts Czechs from the film's violence, forwarding a longstanding idea of national exceptionalism.

Birds, painted birds, are heavily metaphoric in the book: Lech adorns them with bright colors and releases them to their brethren, who peck the interlopers to death. Let me extend this metaphor. At times, The Painted Bird seems to borrow New Wave style in an attempt to restore Czech cinema's international prominence. Yet the attempt falls short. In black and white, after all, birds of any color look the same.