‘The Painted Bird’: A Grueling Deluge Of Human Misery With Little To Say About Life Itself [Review]
Václav Marhoul’s “The Painted Bird” is an impenetrable slog, a parade of agony that begins with a treasured pet being set on fire by village bullies, continues through numerous rape scenes, and fetishizes genocide and slaughter. An adaptation of the novel by Jerzy Kosiński (the subject of its own fair share of controversy, given its initial publication as an autobiographical text and later reveal as a possibly plagiarized work of fiction), “The Painted Bird” is the kind of exploitative cinema that thinks drowning its viewers in increasingly drastic scenes of torture and brutality is inherently righteous.