THE PAINTED BIRD

 Vaclav Marhoul's film of Jerzy Kosinski's novel "The Painted Bird" has already been described as one of the great films about the horrors of war and with a child at its centre has drawn comparisons with both "Ivan's Childhood" and "Come and See" but this terrible film, (terrible in its depiction of the terrors our young hero endures), surpasses them both in some ways though many will find it an almost unendurable watch. The setting is Eastern Europe, the period sometime during World War Two and The Boy, (nameless throughout and superbly played by young Petr Kotlar), is the child literally abandoned with nothing and forced to survive in the harshest of landscapes.

He's an infant Candide in the worst of all possible worlds and each encounter he makes is more terrible than the one before. Sometimes, and perhaps mercifully, these encounters are so extreme as to transcend reality. Surely nothing 'real' could be quite as awful as this and while we may be in the middle of the 20th century these people and this landscape is positively medieval. Shot in luminous black and white by Vladimir Smutny the film does indeed have a terrible beauty; this is one of the most visually arresting black and white films ever made and it is one of the most effective of horror films with a bleakness that is certainly overpowering.

A plethora of 'named' actors, (Udo Kier, Stellan Skarsgard, Harvey Keitel, Julian Sands, Barry Pepper), may be there to give the film international appeal but outside of a select art-house audience I can never seen this being 'popular'. There's only so much misery a person can take and, at close to three hours, the horrors of "The Painted Bird" seem never-ending.