Long, slow, brooding, and heavy, “Fugitive Pieces” is the kind of overwrought trudge through the dark corridors of modern history that is usually better viewed as a cable miniseries. At least you can take a break.

This story-within-a-story-within-a-story concerns a Canadian novelist named Jakob Beer (Stephen Dillane), who struggles mightily to reconcile the loss of his parents and sister in the Holocaust with his own survival. As a small boy, he was rescued and smuggled out of Poland by the archaeologist Athos Roussos (the great Serbian actor Rade Serbedzija), who took him back home to a Greek island in order to hide him from the Nazis — who have now come to occupy his seaside village.

The past is seen as a series of flashbacks, through the memories of the adult Jakob, who shuttles between Toronto and Greece, where he eventually must go to ease the suffering he’s endured since childhood.

No one should envy director Jeremy Podeswa’s task in adapting the source material, a sprawling and lyrical novel by the poet Anne Michaels, which was a sensation when it was published in Canada in 1998. Much of the language survives in narrated scraps of Jakob’s journals, but the funereal seriousness with which Mr. Podeswa has orchestrated the story tends to embrace the character’s psychological turmoil rather than illuminate it.

Mr. Dillane, seen to brashly contrasting effect in the forthcoming “Savage Grace,” scarcely surfaces from Jakob’s reveries and nightmares for long enough to create a more dimensional character. But amid so much melancholy and infinite sadness, there is hope — and redemption. Mr. Serbedzija is always a welcome presence, radiating earthy compassion before the screenplay reduces him to an avuncular Greek caricature. And once Jakob finds true love in the arms of a woman (Ayelet Zurer) who understands him, the tone brightens to a richly felt resolution of sorts. But it’s a long time coming.