Not your average Holocaust movie, the Czech New Wave masterpiece The Fifth Horseman Is Fear avoids the horrors of gas chambers and concentration camps. Director Zbnek Brynych examines the subtler but equally debilitating mental effects of oppression, in what Roger Ebert calls “a nearly perfect film.”

“Pretend you don’t know! Pretend you don’t know! It’s punishable by death!” a madman screams at the camera, when the plot brings the protagonist to an insane asylum. The jarring interjection speaks to both Nazism and Soviet communism — under both oppressive regimes knowledge was dangerous.

Set in Prague during the Nazi occupation, The Fifth Horseman Is Fear follows Dr. Braun, a Jewish doctor forbidden to practice medicine. Instead, he works for Nazi officials cataloguing confiscated Jewish property. All Braun wants to do is survive, but his pragmatic mentality is challenged when an injured resistance fighter stumbles into his apartment building. A quest for morphine leads Dr. Braun through his tortured city, where fear eats away at the social structure. Brynych’s avant-garde World War II drama alludes to his 1964 Czechoslovakia to compare Nazi fascism with Soviet communism. Brynych creates a consistent hum of terror that is meant to strike a cord with an audience that’s familiar with oppression.

Superficially, the city might appear to be normal, but hallucinations, awkward outbursts, and nervous, self-conscious behavior make it clear that society is falling apart. Although images of the Holocaust are never seen, its devastation is understood through an overarching sense of destitution and fear. As Dr. Braun travels through the seedy undergrounds of Prague and back up to his apartment building — where a long winding staircase connects the lives of all his eccentric neighbors — a wide variety of personalities are introduced to the screen, each of whom appears equally tortured.

With minimal dialogue and a creeping pace, the sense of impending doom never leaves the screen. Crying babies, heavy shadows and broken records set a consistent tone of nightmarish anxiety. Drawn frenetically from the dancehall, where beautiful young couples bob and empty Champagne glasses litter the tables, to the apartment building of a former piano teacher that’s stacked high with sheet music and out onto the empty cobblestone streets, the audience is never allowed to feel at ease.

Brynych successfully blurs the line between Nazism and Soviet communism to comment simultaneously on both. The Gestapo, dressed in sharp suits, look more like the KGB than German soldiers, and the film makes no distinction between Jews and Gentiles. As a result, everyone in Dr. Braun’s apartment building is under suspicion—everyone is fearful.

The film is scored with discordant piano music and is full of expressionist cinematography. Short, choppy shots of the doctor’s home serve as exposition. A small pile of books and an empty jar of milk hint at poverty and intellect. His neglected violin suggests passion and creativity that’s been suppressed; and his small bedroom window, which shows a solitary smoking chimney, subtly alludes to the horrors of the Holocaust.

Wrestling to depict two of the 20th century’s most psychologically-debilitating governments, The Fifth Horseman Is Fear can be enjoyed for both its historic and cinematic intrigue. An encapsulation of this synchronicity comes toward the end of the film, when a voice from the radio, declares in a monotone voice, “The longer the war lasts the greater is our faith in the final victory.” It is a message equally at home in either government’s double-speak. Not a voice of hope, Brynych’s film succeeds at sending out a gut-wrenching message of despair.