In his first novel of the same name, set somewhere in Eastern Poland during World War II, Jerzy Kosiński tells an extremely bleak tale, in which, without emotion and seemingly without ethical restraint, he applies the themes of violence, torture and the degradation of man as actions that know no bounds. The director didn’t recoil at the controversy the novel incites to this day, transferring every part of the savagery to the screen, where he heightens it further with a black-and-white lens. The result is a physical film which makes for increasingly agonising viewing as we follow the young protagonist who passes through this hell, both as an observer and repeatedly as a victim. And it is this ice-cold rendering that paradoxically gives the film potency as a passionate cry against the insanity of war.