It’s estimated that more than 90% of Lithuania’s Jewish population perished between 1941, when the Nazi occupation of that country began, and 1944, when the Soviets returned to resume their own persecution. The filmmaker Matt Cimber has taken great care to shoot “Miriam,” a fact-based drama depicting one Lithuanian Jewish woman’s endurance, survival, and eventual flight from ethnic murder during the Nazi occupation and prejudice under Soviet rule, on actual historical locations. Mr. Cimber has also chosen to sprinkle his fictional narrative with first-person documentary testimony from real survivors.

Unfortunately, “Miriam” is a new Holocaust drama with nothing new in it. In spite of enough apparent good intentions and commitment to validate two or three movies, Mr. Cimber’s film feels less like a dramatic historical record than a phonograph record. Pick up the metaphoric tone-arm and set it down anywhere during the film’s two-hour running time and you’ll likely be treated to a familiar refrain from the Hollywood Holocaust movie cliché hit parade.

“One would not think that the evil one could approach this land,” intones Miriam (Ariana Savalas) in words that seem to be cribbed from J.R.R. Tolkien, before a sepia-toned photograph of Heinrich Himmler floats across the screen. “We were all proud and happy, until one day …”

With the Germans closing in on the town of Kovno, a native anti-Semitic gang attacks Miriam Schafer’s middle-class Jewish family home. Leering thugs grab the family menorah and demand that Mr. Schafer turn over the cache of wealth that, as a successful Jewish businessman, he’s bound to have salted away. Satisfied that the Schafers have nothing left to offer (via a strip search that evokes the directorial subtlety of Brett Ratner), the thugs bow out and make room for the real bad guys.

Rather than attempt a genuine depiction of the all-too-real aspects of human nature that make ethnic genocide possible, “Miriam” is content to portray the German soldiers who herd the Schafers into work-camp captivity as uniformly monstrous, jackbooted villains whose faces freeze in a rictus of exaggerated sadistic laughter during each act of humiliation. These are Nazis of that vintage, American World War II propaganda-movie variety.

“You’re better company than Major Strasser,” one flirtatious young soldier tells Miriam after mistaking her fair hair and skin for the results of Aryan breeding. By that point, the film’s broad strokes and potboiler melodrama have become so divorced from smooth representational storytelling that one almost expects to see a digital cameo by Conrad Veidt playing the Major Strasser from “Casablanca.”

Miriam escapes the grim fate that claims the rest of her kin and sits out the remainder of the war posing as the cousin of sympathetic Christian pharmacist Bijaikis (Peter J. Lucas) and his invalid wife, Margritas (Beata Pozniak). But Bijaikis’s interest in his “cousin” becomes more than mere compassion. Miriam is unable to elude the pharmacist’s advances or a resulting visit from the stork, and consumptive Margritas is unable to elude the grim reaper just as Miriam’s baby arrives. At war’s end, Miriam and her baby return to Kovno, where a handsome KGB operative (Dimitri Diatchenko) marries the young mother, and all at last seems tolerably well — until the teenaged child’s real father begins writing her and sending her money.

Eventually, the question of how a representative of an anti-Semitic government and an unknowingly half-Jewish love child will deal with wife and mother’s true background is answered, but the film’s emphasis on droning first-person voice-over ensures that those revelations come as no surprise. I’ve rarely seen a story driven by narration that couldn’t have been improved by scaling it back or removing it entirely. “Miriam” does nothing to shake that belief.

At the very least, a disembodied voice pinpointing the precise emotional tenor of each character’s reaction to events is unfair to the actors getting paid to communicate those reactions. At worst, it encourages scenes that swell with needless pauses or hang on overripe familiar dialogue such as, “It’s my job, it’s not who I am!”

The reliance in “Miriam” on narrative shorthand and melodramatic crescendos makes it feel like cross between a series of World War II-inspired Victorian tableaux vivants and a Power Point presentation. The tragic history of Lithuania’s Jews and the personal histories the film invokes deserve better.