You are in a high-rise apartment in Brooklyn. You do not know how you got here, but your attempts to exit have been foiled. The rest of the world is out there, somewhere, distinguishable only by the sight of the L train through the window, the buzz of a Blackberry on the coffee table, and the sound of a mother’s voice squawking through the landline.

Inside this apartment—this hushed gallery of urbane imports, African sculpture, Dutch tulips—a dance of decorum begins. At first, manners and 21st century etiquette enamel the brutality of a fight in the park (our son’s tooth is broken; our son is very sorry). But as tempers begin to rise and 18-year-old single malt scotch begins to flow, the veneer of two marriages decays—and with it, the veil of decorum. The tragedy of this film has nothing to do with the sons’ initial battle or broken teeth, but rather with the truth of less public interactions—behind every “happy” marriage lie anger, perfidy, and mediocrity: the humanity in each of us.

Roman Polanski’s newest film, Carnage, starring Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz, and John C. Reilly, retains elements of the play, God of Carnage, by French playwright Yasmina Reza. Eschewing the scene changes and quick cuts that allow contemporary film to bridge space and time, Polanski borrows from the source text a stasis usually attributed to theater. Like theater, the film is faithful to temporal and spatial reality. And all within one single space—the stage, transcribed to film. I’m reminded at once of imagined productions of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night and Sartre’s No Exit. Nor do the reputations of these works seem too pretentious to ascribe here—Carnage is strikingly, and perhaps almost sickeningly, aware of its own position in a long lineage of literary, theatrical, and cinematic works. Framed between four walls of a lavish apartment, it is so notably an art piece that it may as well be a painting by Vermeer.

The static spatial composition might make the film difficult to watch for most casual moviegoers or even seasoned critics (godlike A.O. Scott of the New York Times suggested it might be better as a parlor game than as a moving picture), and in fact a viewer expecting a more conventional melodrama of hero and heroine will be sorely disappointed. The motives and morals at work in Polanski’s Carnage are both more complex and more discreet than your average soap-opera fistfight or crying-jag—in fact it is this nuance that would cause its inevitable failure as a parlor game or anything so overt. The question instead is whether Carnage should ever have been lifted from the stage to the screen. The general complaint among critics seems to be one not of boredom, but of problems with adaptation. What can we take away from transplanting the single-room stage to a system of potentially limitless space and time?

Only by recognizing the filmic possibilities that Polanski’s self-imposed limits reject can we value a cinematic experience that is not only truly unusual, but also somewhat uncomfortable. Instead of dealing in a conventional practice of following one character at a time, revealing their motives and aligning the audience with their inevitable good intentions (think Crash for an extreme example), Polanski’s camera pays equal attention to each member of the group, demonstrating each disturbing flaw and awkward failure with the objectivity of a common outsider—like any audience member. Or, critics might say, like any theatergoer.

But the space gets in the way. The camera is constantly too close to the actors’ faces. The focus is too shallow. With a certain voyeurism, Polanski grants us the perspective of a casual observer, invisibly watching events unfold in a home that is not our own. We’re a blank slate, drawing our own conclusions but powerless to effect change. Just as powerless, he seems to suggest, as the characters themselves, acting through a system of rules that they don’t quite understand, unable to overcome their differences despite their best efforts. They cannot even leave the room when the scene escalates to violence—in these moments, every sane member of the audience squirms with empathy. Embarrassment. The camera careens as the characters stumble drunkenly and finally speak their minds. We feel for them. We’re there with them. We are them. And, in the end, this feeling of familiar, morning-after awkwardness alone justifies the adaptation. By moving from stage to screen, Polanski takes confinement one step further, trapping not only the characters on the stage, but the camera—and us—on the screen.

Turning his camera inward, Polanski relies on the internal—the balance of poise and chaos present in every structure, from the modern couple to the contemporary war. The camera never leaves the room, but manages instead to peer inside the human experience, revealing the modern carnage within each of us.