But “The Painted Bird” hasn’t vanished. For some, it remains a potent chronicle of atrocity with a vivid central metaphor for childhood. The title comes from one of the people that takes in the boy: a bird trapper who, in anguish for his lover, paints a bird before releasing it, rendering it unrecognizable to its flock. The other birds pick it apart in mid-air.

So “The Painted Bird” has been redrawn again, this time as an imposing art film — somber, savage and beautifully shot in 35mm black and white. It’s a form perhaps well suited to Kosinski’s half-true tale, and there’s no grim scene here that Marhoul isn’t eager to shoot handsomely. At times, “The Painted Bird,” which was shortlisted for the best international film Academy Award, verges on a parody of a European art film, so unremittingly committed it is to depicting — sometimes accurately, sometimes gratuitously — humanity’s worst.

“Come and fetch me,” writes the Boy (who goes unnamed) at the outset of the film on the sail of a small boat he sends down a stream. On it he’s drawn a picture of himself and his parents, who have left him with an elderly peasant woman (Nina Shunevych). It’s a desolate beginning but “The Painted Bird,” plays out like an unceasing, tormenting cycle of out of the frying pan, into the fire.

When the woman dies and the house is consumed by a fire, the Boy sets out through the countryside. But he’s greeted fearfully by nearby villagers who curse him as “the devil’s seed.” A shaman (Alla Sokolova) judges him a vampire and takes him for a slave. The film proceeds in chapters dedicated to each of the Boy’s temporary homes. Each is a dark parable, without lesson, of murder, rape, torture and mutilation. “The Painted Bird” proceeds as a gruesome monolith to a sinister Slavic society.