The Peasants: an epic Polish novel is brought to life in this beguiling hand-painted animation

With Loving Vincent (2017), Hugh and DK Welchman pioneered the first fully painted animated feature film, making use of an almost absurdly labour-intensive process: they filmed scenes using actors, and then more than a hundred artists reproduced 65,000 frames as oil paintings, in pastiche Van Gogh style, to tell the story of a young man delivering the artist’s last letter to his brother Theo. The directors have used the same technique in their adaptation of the Nobel Prize-winning Polish author Władysław Reymont’s 1904 novel The Peasants – a film that is similarly audacious but struggles to articulate the reasoning behind its own high-concept efforts.

The script streamlines Reymont’s 900-page text into the coming-of-age of the beautiful Jagna (Kamila Urzędowska). Jagna begins an affair with the rugged, embittered farmhand Antek (Robert Gulaczyk) – only to then marry Antek’s elderly widowed father Maciej (Mirosław Baka) in exchange for six acres of his finest land. It’s a brutal contract – brutal in the clarity of Boryna’s purchase of his young wife, in knowing that the peasant Jagna could only say yes to such an offer – and Jagna breaks it almost immediately by sleeping with Antek again. The villagers turn on Jagna, labelling her promiscuous, saying that she will bring a bad harvest, and treating her like a cancer – a malignant thing that needs to be cut out for the health of the whole.

It’s a familiar parable of the tension between private desire and public moralising, told through enjoyable but conventional melodramatic gestures. The real artistry, of course, is meant to lie in the experimental animation. At first the effect is indeed beguiling, especially in the film’s arresting folk-dance set pieces: each moment initially seems to modify and re-reveal itself, presenting a mesmerising world in constant flux. But the spell breaks as soon as your eyes adjust to the actual style of painting on show. While the impasto-heavy scenes of Loving Vincent often felt truly strange and hallucinatory, The Peasants adopts a vexing photorealism – one that thins its painterly quality, compromising the pleasurable textures of modernist painting upon which the Welchmans’ entire strategy depends.

There is also the question of – why? Why this story in this style? You could argue that the Welchmans are intervening in Reymont’s project: that the film is drawing attention to the pretence inherent in the ‘realist’ literary tradition by amping up the artificiality. But it seems more likely that a nebulous sense of creating something ‘immersive’ is what is most valued here – a factor that’s significant in filmmaking, but perhaps not in and of itself an argument for a process that’s dangerously close to becoming a gimmick.

 ► The Peasants is in UK cinemas now.