169 min | NR | July 17, 2020 | IFC Films
A boy sent to the countryside to survive the Holocaust loses his parents and wanders alone through a landscape of peasants who decide he is a demon. Every village he reaches finds a new way to brutalize him. It is three hours of unbroken cruelty, shot in beautiful black and white, and it never once lets you breathe.
A boy with dark hair and dark eyes wanders war-torn Eastern Europe alone. His parents send him to the countryside to escape the Holocaust. They die before they can retrieve him. What follows is a journey through a peasant landscape that treats the boy as cursed, demonic, or disposable depending on who finds him. Václav Marhoul builds the film as a catalog of human cruelty, and the boy’s silence becomes its central argument. The film is about what happens to a child when every adult he meets decides he is less than human.
Petr Kotlár plays Joska with almost no dialogue and absorbs the entire film through his face. He registers each new horror without performing it, and the flatness of his reactions becomes more disturbing than any scream. Udo Kier plays the Miller as a man whose jealousy curdles into a single act of mutilation that the camera refuses to look away from. Harvey Keitel plays the Priest with a weary decency that offers the boy his only fragile shelter. Stellan Skarsgård plays Hans, a German soldier ordered to execute Joska, and finds something close to mercy in a single glance. Each actor enters for one chapter and leaves a permanent mark.
Marhoul adapts Jerzy Kosiński’s novel and shoots in black and white on 35mm with cinematographer Vladimír Smutný. The decision to render the violence in monochrome strips the blood of its lurid color and leaves only composition and gesture. Smutný frames the boy small against vast gray fields and low skies, and the landscape itself becomes an indifferent witness. Marhoul divides the film into named chapters, each titled for the person who takes the boy in, and the structure turns the journey into a grim accumulation. The sound design favors wind, footsteps, and silence over music, which forces the audience to sit inside each scene with no relief.
The film commits fully to its method and never blinks. That commitment is also its limitation. The relentless sequence of atrocity flattens into a single note, and the boy’s suffering starts to feel like a thesis being proven rather than a story being told. Marhoul has made a monumental and punishing work that demands endurance and offers little in return except the conviction that he meant every frame.