The Painted Bird

Wow. 

Fuck. 

Nabarvené Ptáče (The Painted Bird) is fairly merciless. This is one of the most starkly violent movies I've seen. It opens with a truly horrific sequence, where a young boy is being pursued as he carries a small mongoose. It's a shocking way to begin the movie, and the first five minutes are brutal as a way to set the tone for what is to come. 

Animals are actually central to how The Painted Bird works, and although the film is about inhumanity and the violence people perpetrate on other people, it also places that inhumanity in the context of the violence with which we treat animals. In addition to the mongoose there is an important horse in the film, and a goat, and many birds and rats. The film's eponymous painted bird is obviously an image of the main character, and of the Jewish people in Eastern Europe, but it is also an actual bird, an animal tormented and killed by its own unfeeling, unthinking relatives. The Painted Bird is gorgeously, exquisitely shot, and its subject matter is chilling, even terrifying. This film will stay with me a long time.

The Painted Bird is about the Shoah, yes, but this is not a film about the camps – or about hiding from Nazis, as most descriptions of the movie would have one believe. Instead it's about a boy trying to find a place where he can breathe and live and flourish. All he finds instead is greed and jealousy and hatred and fury and racism and perversion. It's a vicious portrait.

I watched The Painted Bird on Hulu.