When we first glimpse the explorer Ferdinand Magellan in the stunning new film that bears his name, he is lying on a corpse-strewn beach, looking near death himself. It’s 1511, and he has just participated in the Portuguese conquest of Malacca, a historic state in what is now Malaysia. “Magellan” was written and directed by the Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz, who composes this scene—and many others that follow—as a kind of tableau vivant, presented at a remove that places equal emphasis on characters and environments. Diaz’s technique allows you to relax into the frame and absorb every detail: the bodies scattered along the shore, the tide running red with blood. It takes a moment to register Magellan’s presence at all, and to see that he is played by Gael García Bernal, a stealer of hearts the world over but, in this role, neither a romantic lead nor a conquering hero.

Two years later, Magellan is again by the sea, but now back in Lisbon, where he’s confronted by a host of women in black: they are the widows of men who perished on the voyage, and they’re desperate for answers. (Here, too, Diaz tempers realism with near-ceremonial formalism.) Magellan cannot account for his actions; he knows only the cold, acquisitive language of power. Hoping to impress King Manuel of Portugal, he ticks off the benefits of a westward sea route to the Spice Islands: “More territories for Portugal. More Christian conversions. Halting the Islamic advance.” But the poet Francisco de Sá de Miranda (Paulo Calatré) provides a clearer-eyed assessment: “We are killing so many . . . in the name of the crown and God.” Magellan experiences no such pangs of conscience, and he shows no loyalty to any one crown. Spurned by Manuel, he aligns himself with Spain, which grants him the fleet he desires. More killing awaits.

Diaz, now sixty-seven years old, is a venerated figure at international film festivals, his work justly acclaimed for its observational acuity and novelistic texture. His approach is often described in terms of what he doesn’t do: he is skeptical of narrative convention, allergic to closeups, and loath to move the camera within a scene—unless, as in “Magellan,” it happens to be on a raft, floating downstream under a gentle tropical shower, or on a ship, bobbing along on Atlantic waves. (The director shot and edited the film himself, with Artur Tort.) He also shies away from direct depictions of slaughter, preferring to cut to the aftermath, with gruesome matter-of-factness. “Magellan” isn’t an action movie; it’s a consequence movie. But Diaz, within all this meticulous subtraction, adds dramatic heft and political meaning. In draining any visceral excitement from violence, he subtly decolonizes the camera’s gaze. “Magellan,” a tale of death, disease, mutiny, and mutually assured destruction, is the most powerful anti-imperialist epic I’ve seen since Lucrecia Martel’s “Zama” (2018), which fixed a withering comic glare on the expansionist bloodlust of eighteenth-century Europe. Diaz’s instincts aren’t as viciously funny, though a bone-dry comedy does rear its head when one character loses his: during the voyage, a shipmaster, caught having sex with a cabin boy belowdecks, is put to death for “crimes against nature.”