While it’s a bit programmatic for my taste, this 1968 black comedy in black and white is undeniably creepy—once director Juraj Herz enters the fractured mind of his protagonist, he refuses to budge.

A black political farce from Czechosolvakia, centered on an employee of a crematorium whose growing mania for his job turns at first into the conviction that he is a divinely appointed “purifier” of ...