There can be little doubt that this sprawling, philosophical epic is a masterpiece. But it's hard to be a viewer watching Hard to Be a God nonetheless. The last film from the great Soviet master Aleksei German (My Friend Ivan Lapshin, Khrustalyov, My Car!) required a seven-year shoot and a six- year edit: the picture was not yet finished when German died in 2013, and it fell to his wife and son (also a director) to finish the sound mix.

Ostensibly an adaptation of a 1964 novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (authors of Roadside Picnic, which Andrei Tarkovsky adapted as Stalker), and Definitely Maybe (which Aleksandr Sokurov made into Days of Eclipse), Hard to Be a God concerns a scientist, part of a team sent to live on a planet where the human-like natives never experienced a Renaissance.

We soon learn why: this planet purges the literate and the curious by drowning them in latrines or hanging them in public squares, drenched in lard.

The scientist, who now lives as a demi-god nobleman (Leonid Yarmolnik), does not interfere with the depravity that surrounds him: he merely wanders through it, often blindly drunk and playing jazz loudly. The fourth wall is repeatedly broken as slack- jawed peasants peer into the lens. There is something of Bela Tarr in the film’s meandering design, although German’s fetid carnivalesque presentation often leaves the eyes to wander where they may.

Where to look? So much of the action is governed by bodily fluids: people spit and vomit and bleed and ooze from every orifice. Meats rot. Corpses rot. No film in history has ever contained so much excrement. German's grim monochrome frequently recalls the hell parts of Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthy Delights, had that triptych been smeared most liberally with fecal matter.

There is no escaping German’s world of feculence: if we are inclined to look away, there are characters onscreen sniffing audibly or raising their filthy fingers to their nose. (What a relief the viewer isn’t issued with Odorama scratch’n’ sniff cards.)

It would be easy to equate this festering universe’s anti-intellectualism with Stalinist purges or with German’s own struggles as an artist (he completed only five feature films in a lengthy career).

But Hard to Be a God feels bigger than such things. Oblique and dense in a manner that makes those other great Strugatsky-inspired films look like Star Wars episodes, the film relentlessly hammers out humanity's propensity for barbarism.

Without art and learning, the film reasons, there is nothing but shit. Piles of the stuff.