I found this movie after finishing the book. Reviews were very mixed, meaning there was something unusual in it.
And there was.
Filth. Dirt. Shit. Mud. Chickens. Bare butts. Asses. Ass dicks. Spilled guts.
Uncouth behaviour. Smearing mud in your friends' faces. Insane singing. Laughing. Rawness and sex and the fall of any standards.
I haven't seen anything as visceral as this, yet instead of feling exhilirating, it felt oppressive. Characters did all this while maintaining a regular cadence of speech, not raising the voices too much. How can you make the screams of the tortured dull and washed out? Apparently you can.
And that's before you get to the scenery. If makes you feel as if you're one of the peasants snooping into the lives of the aristocracy - or other peasants. You squeeze through between bodies, between hanging carcsses, weapons, animals, and you only get glimpses of the action (which you hear quite well, but who is speaking?) because there's always something in the way - a hanging rope, someone passing through, a flying chicken, the wall, some fool making faces at you.

This article: filmcomment.com/blog/aleksei-g… got it right. The movie is in a class of its own. It pulls you into a world full of atmosphere, heavy, thick, unpleasant atmosphere. It doesn't matter that it hardly contains any plot - it could have been based on any vaguely medieval story. What matters is that it does something no one else tries.

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^{Jonathan Romney (Film Comment)}