Starring Märt Avandi. In Estonian and Russian, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable

Although somewhat boxed in by its own physical beauty, The Fencer is so uniformly well-crafted, it should be shown in film schools as a model of technical artists operating at the highest level.

For his fifth feature, Finnish director Klaus Härö—who’s been at it long enough to have received an award from Ingmar Bergman—chose a little-known true story about an Estonian fencing master who survived both the Nazi invasion of his country and its long Soviet occupation thereafter. As in many nations annexed by Hitler, young men were immediately conscripted to fight alongside the Germans. This happened to our sword-swishing protagonist Endel Nelis, played here by rangy, ginger-haired Märt Avandi, who resembles a young Max von Sydow. (The real guy didn’t, by the way.)

We meet Nelis around 1952, after he has survived some years in the wilderness and then in Leningrad, under an assumed name, while pursuing his love of fencing. Now he has returned to Estonia, to the nowhere coastal town of Haapsalu, and is hired to teach phys-ed classes to disconsolate children who lost parents in the war. The Soviet-toadying school principal (a Steve Buscemi type named Hendrik Toompere) sniffs at Nelis’s inclusion of fencing in his skill set, since it’s “not very proletarian”. But when this apparatchik fails to supply any decent sports equipment, the new teach gathers reeds in the forest and fashions foils for his excited students, including a fatherless lad (Joonas Koff) who admires him, and a tiny blond preteen (cast standout Liisa Koppel) whose ferocity sparks the whole class.

The director builds dread masterfully, but screenwriter Anna Heinämaa softens the edges by replacing dangerous realities with crowd-pleasing tropes. The upright, necessarily cagey Nelis exhibits few flaws—okay, he doesn’t like kids at the start—and he’s given a handy love interest in the form of a fellow teacher (Ursula Ratasepp). It’s this sort of by-the-numbers storytelling that lets us down. In fact, there’s little evidence that Nelis was actually chased by the KGB, and the film’s view of him as uncomplicated hero hollows the experience somewhat.

Still, the flawless casting, softly radiant lighting, dusty yellow-and-green palette, and extraordinary wide-screen compositions are ceaselessly engaging, and the tale builds to a satisfying sports-movie finish. Above all, The Fencer is a reminder that the simplest gestures can be lethal to authoritarians of any stripe.