Stellan Skarsgard on The Painted Bird, the most shocking film you'll ever see 

He met his wife in Ireland, but the Swedish actor has delved into much darker times for a WWII drama that is the ultimate difficult watch  

Stellan Skarsgard in The Painted Bird.

It’s been hailed as both a masterpiece and one of the most relentlessly tough experiences a viewer could sit through. Vaclav Marhoul’s foreign-language drama The Painted Bird is told through the eyes of a lone young Jewish boy in eastern Europe as the latter days of WWII rage. He has been hidden by his family in the countryside amid a mass extermination of Jews.

Adapted from the controversial 1965 novel and filmed in black and white, he meets various characters motivated by fear, hate and a self-interest driven by desperation. It’s a story about how war brutalises people - and it doesn’t shy away in its depiction.