During World War II, the Soviet Union suffered staggering casualties (an estimated 22 to 28 million dead). As recounted in Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich’s compelling oral history, The Unwomanly Face of War, many of those losses were borne by women.

When Kantemir Balagov’s extraordinary second film (after Closeness) opens in postwar Leningrad, survivors are still reeling from that conflict’s devastation. The first sounds heard, over the opening titles, are dripping water, a strange high-pitched hum, and tiny gasps. The camera soon focuses on the pale, frozen face of Iya (an impressive Viktoria Miroshnichencko) caught in a PSTD-related seizure in the laundry room of the veterans’ hospital where she works as a nurse. Gradually she returns to consciousness as her coworkers call out her nickname, “Beanpole,” a reference to Iya’s giraffe-like height.

Leningrad in the fall of 1945 is a cold and grim city still struggling with hunger after a two-year siege by the Nazis; kindly hospital administrator Nikolay (Andrey Bykov) surreptitiously sneaks a dead patient’s food rations to Iya and her toddler son, Pashka (Timofey Glazov), whom she brings to work when she can no longer find a babysitter. When wounded soldiers, entertaining Pashka with animal imitations, ask him to bark like a dog, he stares at them mutely. “How would he know what a dog is like?” asks one man. “They’ve all been eaten.”

Still, despite hunger and the difficulties of living in a crowded communal apartment, Iya and Pashka enjoy plenty of affection until an evening of play turns into tragedy when Iya suffers a catatonic episode, and, in one heartbreaking long take, the weight of her unconscious body smothers the little boy, the camera fixed in a tight close up on his tiny fist clutching her hair until it ceases.

Before viewers can catch their breath, the real (and even darker) story line begins in the next scene with the return of Masha (a charismatic Vasilisa Perelygina), Iya’s best friend and Pashka’s actual mother. She had chosen to stay in the military to avenge her husband’s death and handed Pashka’s care over to Iya, who had been invalided out of the service after suffering a concussion. Iya reluctantly tells Masha that Pashka had died in his sleep, and the stunned Masha immediately insists the two of them go dancing. Picked up by the horny but inexperienced Sasha (Igor Shirokov) and his socially smoother wingman, Masha pushes Iya out of the car, along with Sasha’s friend, and has sex (in another long take) with Sasha. She later explains to Iya, “I want a human inside me.”

Angry, grief-stricken, manipulative, Masha is determined to become a mother again. Upon learning that she is infertile, she turns to a shocked and unwilling Iya as her surrogate, cruelly reminding her “you didn’t keep my child alive.”  The film follows their twisted and complicated relationship as both women seek to heal their traumas, Iya, through her mostly unexpressed love for Masha, and an increasingly emotionally unstable Masha, in her quest for motherhood and in her dalliance with Sasha, the son of well-off Communist Party apparatchiks. When Nikolay asks Iya why she wants a baby, she responds, “I want to be the master of her.”

Given the technical skill and assurance with which this film was made, it’s hard to believe that its director is only 27.  Born in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union, Balagov certainly didn’t grow up in the Soviet world of shabby communal apartments, poorly equipped hospitals, and lavish dachas enjoyed only by Party elites that is so authentically re-created (kudos to production designer Sergey Ivanov), but he brilliantly captures the desolation of people struggling to rebuild their lives after so much devastation. In an astonishing scene, Masha asks a neighbor, a seamstress who is fitting a green dress on her, if she can twirl in it. Her hand caresses the soft fabric, but as Masha spins faster and faster, her laughter and delight at her newfound femininity turns into screams of rage and grief.

This bleakly beautiful film, by a director in full control of his artistic powers and with phenomenal performances by two newcomers, is not easy to watch, but many of its scenes are unforgettable.

Beanpole is now screening at the New York Film Festival.