Starring Stephen Dillane, Rade Serbedzija, and Ayelet Zurer. In English, Greek, and Yiddish with English subtitles. Rated 14A. Opens Friday, May 2, at the Cinemark Tinseltown and the Fifth Avenue Cinemas

There’s nothing quite like this remarkable take on Anne Michaels’s poetic novel about the life of Jakob, who, as a boy, escapes Nazi-occupied Europe only to be haunted by bitter memories he is later compelled to put on paper. As adapted by Canadian writer-director Jeremy Podeswa, it’s as solemn as a Verdi opera and as juicily uneven as any given Saturday Afternoon at the Opera.

Britain’s Stephen Dillane (of Welcome to Sarajevo) manfully handles the task of playing the rumpled hero, from pained youth to slightly warmer middle age, connecting the tangents of a character equally afloat in postwar Greece and 1970s Toronto. And he is more than matched by 24 veteran Rade Serbedzija, as the Zorba-like Greek archaeologist who finds the lad (initially played by Robbie Kay) in the Polish woods after the boy’s family is destroyed.

The weak link here is Rosamund Pike in the thankless role of Jakob’s whiny first wife, but this void is nicely compensated by the impossibly sexy presence of Israeli Ayelet Zurer as a fellow dweller in the past (she’s a museum curator) who rescues him from a life of nothing but dust.

There are some accent conflicts amid this international cast, which also includes the U.K.’s Ed Stoppard as Jakob’s young godson. (The book actually centres on this character.) Yet even that somehow goes with the tale’s harsh disjunctures in time and place. The narrative is slightly overstuffed, and the musical score sticks too closely to the elegiacal. But the emotions are expansive, and the movie’s visual beauty (courtesy of Vancouver cinematographer Gregory Middleton) is matched by passages of truly memorable writing, so this is a literary experience in the best sense—although it is certain that a few viewers will find the movie too much like reading.