This documentary had the potential to become something great. Steve McQueen adapted his Dutch wife Bianca Stigter’s book that chronicled the war years in Amsterdam, creating a comprehensive guide to the city where the reader can look up a place they’re interested in and read about the tragic and sometimes absurd personal stories behind that address, comparing them with the present.

The film doesn’t work that way. It piles up one story after another, a narrator going through all this heartache and terror during the Nazi occupation, with four slow hours of modern everyday life in the city serving as a contrast.

The result, unfortunately, is exhausting, testing one’s patience.

2023-U.K.-The Netherlands-U.S. 266 min. Color. Directed by Steve McQueen. Book: Bianca Stigter (”Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945”).

Trivia: Co-produced by McQueen and Stigter. In Dutch theaters, Carice van Houten served as narrator.