Cinematography isn’t the whole of a movie, but a cinematographer can play a pivotal role in amplifying or elaborating upon its temper, tone, and quality. “Citizen Kane” is inconceivable without the sterling eye of Gregg Toland, the same can be said for the efforts of Sven Nykvist in “Hour of the Wolf,” and let’s not forget Robert Krasker, the master craftsman who did much to make “The Third Man” the brilliant monument that it is.

These movies came to mind as points of comparison for director Jessica Oreck’s “One Man Dies a Million Times,” a contemporary picture where color is absent. Black-and-white movies have long been bemoaned by studio execs as unprofitable fillips, and they can be a hard sell to anyone under that age of 40 — as if the lack of color connotes a corresponding lack of relevance or value. There has, admittedly, been a recent bump in black-and-white pictures, and it’s worth considering the intent of filmmakers who take this path. Why forego the abundance of chroma available at one’s fingertips?

“One Man Dies a Million Times” isn’t completely in black-and-white. There are snatches of color that punctuate the film, usually employed to connote disastrous events taking place out-of-doors. On the whole, however, director of photography Sean Price Williams works with a palette consisting of dense and absorbent blacks, grays that are alternately gritty or silky-smooth, and a range of whites that veer from ineffably tender to unspeakably harsh. Ms. Oreck has worked with Mr. Williams before, but even she must have been taken aback by the sumptuousness of his work here.

The irony is that the sensuality of Mr. Williams’s lens works in a distinct counterpoint to the dystopian hellscape that serves as the picture’s setting. An uneasy amalgam of historical fact and dystopian reverie, “One Man Dies a Million Times” begins and ends with explanatory texts about “a true story from the past … [that] takes place in our near future.” The use of black-and-white provides a tightrope between the hard-and-fast and the yet-to-be.

Ms. Oreck’s stock-in-trade is the documentary, an emphasis she doesn’t altogether abandon. At the center of the film is the true story of the N.I. Vavilov Institute of Plant Genetic Resources, a research facility based in St. Petersburg, Russia. Established in 1921, the Institute claims the world’s largest holding of seeds, a resource considered so valuable that when the collection was under threat during World War II, botanists died of starvation rather than consume its contents. 

Ms. Oreck further muddies the waters of fiction with the addition of voiceover readings culled from the poems and journals of Russian citizens who survived the Siege of Leningrad. If that weren’t enough, “One Man Dies a Million Times” was filmed in and around the actual Vavilov Research Institute. Ms. Oreck’s rationale for positing this morality tale as science-fiction is clear: What with “declining food security, climate change,” and other environmental concerns, the future is today.

There’s a love story nestled in the center of “One Man Dies a Million Times,” but in the grand tradition of Dostoevsky and Tarkovsky, character and motivation devolve into forums for philosophical grandstanding. The mise en scène and actors are commanding enough to hold our attention, but sometimes one prefers the cheapjack sensationalism of “Soylent Green,” another film about an ecosystem at the end of its rope, to an artfully contrived exegesis about the worth of the individual in the context of a greater good.

Still and all, “One Man Dies a Million Times” is worth a look-see: Ms. Oreck’s attention to detail is worthy of Van Eyck, her cinematic determination almost Sisyphean in nature, and did I mention the choice of cinematographer? In that regard, Ms. Oreck’s taste is impeccable, and her new picture is a confirmation of a headstrong and talented filmmaker.