The company is Hungarian, pressed into service with their German allies occupying a corner of the partially-conquered Soviet Union during World War II. But as they troop through the dreary woods, drifting from one fraught encounter with the locals to the next, a pall of doom hangs over their actions as they await the next partisan ambush and that next atrocity against civilians.

They could be any army or EveryArmy caught up in a Vietnam, Iraq, Central America or Central Africa, men in arms trapped in tedium, tit-for-tat reprisals and indefensible actions reconciled with a shrug and a thought but never said aloud excuse and explanation — “The fog of war.”

Director and co-writer Dénes Nagy’s “Natural Light” (“Természetes fény”) is a somber, myopic grunts-eye-view of occupation duty in a forested corner of the USSR in the early 1940s. We see the grim routine of men in their own country’s uniforms, but wearing the helmets of their German overseers, oppressing, exploiting and terrorizing the natives far behind the front lines.

It’s a movie of few words and a few telling incidents, all of it captured in a nearly monochromatic color film of wintry greys, browns and foggy, diffuse “natural light.”

Corporal Semetka (Ferenc Szabó) is our poker-faced guide to this world, a combat veteran just following orders, accepting the latest denial of leave, silent as his patrol relieves two hunters, who went to all the trouble to fashion a raft to bring the elk they shot home to their families, of the all their meat.

Semetka is savvy enough to silently de-escalate an encounter with wood-cutters, even if he guesses their partisan sympathies, human enough to fancy a local widow in a village his company takes over as shelter, man enough to recognize that walking away from that tempation as the most humane thing he can do in a world of rape, summary executions and stealing food from the starving.

And he’s experienced enough to know the proper pace to set on a march into partisan-infested woods, which his brusque commanding officer ignores and promptly gets killed for swapping out Semetka from walking point.

“Natural Light” is more a study in sober, building dread than a straight-up combat film. The action is limited to a nightime firefight, a couple of harrowing moments of interrogation and threats and a rare burst of emotion.

Nagy lets us sense what is coming and steadily steel ourselves for it and resign ourselves to it as it happens.

The lack of action beats makes it somewhat static and dull at times. But the film fits into a rich tradition of combat cinema where the dangerous drudgery of the work, the moral compromises it demands and the ugly shocks of action and reaction are both sudden and wholly-expected long before they happen.

Others step into the frame with Szabó, but he is the face and the conscience of the movie, not quite playing the Hungarians as Victims party line of that country’s right wing historical revisionists, acknowledging guilt and expressing remorse only with his thousand yard stare.

And Nagy immerses us in this time and this world with simple images, archetypal characters and common-to-combat-film situations, another army far from home, out of its depth and uncertain of the necessity and ethics of its mission.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Ferenc Szabó, László Bajkó, Illés Pál and Anna Lancenka

Credits: Directed by Dénes Nagy, scripted by Dénes Nagy and Pál Závada A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:43