There comes a moment, late in Roman Polanski's The Pianist, when Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody), the titular artist, sits down to play, after years without doing so. A Polish Jew, he's been hiding from the Nazis in Warsaw, sometimes looked after by friendly non-Jews, more often scrambling for his life, peering from windows and fading into dark corners.

He is near starving, his hair hanging in clumps off his skull, his skin pale and gray. A German officer (Thomas Kretschmann) discovers Szpilman and commands him to play something. The performance is more urgent and fateful than any he might ever have imagined. He's playing for his life, but it's difficult to know exactly what that life might mean now -- he's been so wholly traumatized that he seems as if he can only play for the sake of playing, to be in this moment. He sits at the piano, and his music, Chopin, swells from him. The light filters through dust and filthy windows, seeming to show through him, his face, fingers and nose so frail as to look translucent.

It's a stunning moment, after many such in the film. Broken and haggard, Szpilman bows his head, focusing on the keys before him. The image conveys too many emotions at once -- fear, certainly, but also excitement, dignity, rage, rapture, depression, disbelief and debilitation.

Szpilman will survive this encounter. You know this because the film is based on his memoirs (published in 1946). Opening in September 1939, The Pianist introduces the young artist as he is playing that same Chopin nocturne for a Warsaw Radio broadcast, a kind of stubborn refusal to acknowledge that life is already changed forever, that the Germans had invaded weeks before, that bodies now litter the streets. As he plays, the Luftwaffe starts bombing the city, and while his engineer runs for cover, he continues to play, until the wall blows through, and he sees he will, indeed, have to leave the building.

Again and again, Szpilman and his family (two sisters, brother and parents) tell themselves that what is happening all around them and to them cannot be happening. Such denials seem foolish and appalling in hindsight, but chillingly understandable here: What lies before them is too incredible. Tragically, they stay in their apartment (until they are forcibly removed to the ghetto), hear of acquaintances carted away to labor camps, see their neighbors murdered in the night; they can't quite act. And so they wait, until they too are moved to a barracks, and then into train cars to take them to a camp. As they walk to the station, Szpilman tells one sister that he wishes he had known her better.

The film mostly takes Szpilman's view, showing the atrocities he sees -- a child smuggler killed as he tries to slip under the ghetto wall; a starving man licking spilled slop off the pavement; an old man in a wheelchair dropped out a window to his death; a woman weeping for the loss of her child, whom she smothered to keep quiet as the Nazis passed by; a row of men lying on the ground, shot in their heads one by one. Polanksi and cinematographer Pawel Edelman hardly linger on any of these images. Such events occur daily, with increasing frequency, so that each horror is soon overlaid by another.

Szpilman's story takes its own unpredictable turn when an old acquaintance now policing for the Germans sends him running from the train he and his family are about to board. The rest of the film tracks his efforts to survive, event by event, not so much building to a climax as demonstrating the delirium of existing day to day -- first in a brick-laying force (for which the frail musician is hopelessly ill-equipped), then as a kind of shadow person, hiding in apartments, fed (occasionally) by Polish resisters, watching the 1943 ghetto uprising from an apartment window as if it's a movie. A fixed long shot displays shots fired, bodies falling, smoke and chaos.

Finally forced to evacuate (a shell crashes through the building), Szpilman spends the rest of the film keeping out of sight. While the action, such as it is, now decreases, the film becomes almost unbearably acute, approximating (though of course, never precisely representing) the man's psychic state, his process of internalization. Alone, afraid, shrinking inside his clothes, Szpilman reflects the debris-strewn streets and collapsed structures that surround him. His view becomes even narrower, looking through cracked windows and from inside hiding places, even, at one time, from the street where he lies still, playing dead as soldiers clomp past him.

This attenuation -- Szpilman's diminished view, his simultaneous dread of seeing and need to see, his embodiment of an uncanny sort of negative space -- is The Pianist's most startling effect. Brody's physical and emotional reduction is part of it, but even more extraordinary is the paring away of the film's self-image, its presumed capacity to elucidate and illustrate. As it is, on its surface, a series of declines and disappearances, The Pianist attends to the senses in ways that grander pictures cannot.