BERLIN — In Germany, one of the first countries to acknowledge film’s aesthetic potential, cinema has had an enormous impact on art and culture. When it comes to theater, this influence has been especially profound.

One of the prevailing approaches to drama here, a staging philosophy known as Regietheater, or director’s theater, has been heavily influenced by the auteur theory of cinema and gives directors the artistic license to make their productions every bit as individual and distinctive as a film by Stanley Kubrick or David Lynch.

It’s little surprise, then, that German stage directors are increasingly turning to movies for inspiration.

David Bösch’s “Die Verdammten” at the Berliner Ensemble, based on Luchino Visconti’s controversial 1969 film, “The Damned,” is one of several new plays in Germany this season that take their cue from European film classics from the 1960s and ’70s. It is also one of the best. At the start of Mr. Bösch’s severe and menacing production, the swooning strains of the sleepwalking scene from Verdi’s “Macbeth” signal the director’s intention to respect, if not to channel, Visconti’s operatic sensibility. On another level, it sets the stage for a retelling of Shakespeare’s play as a lurid melodrama about a German industrialist family during the early years of the Third Reich.

In the wake of Hitler’s rise to power, the von Essenbecks, a family with a steel concern in the Ruhr Valley, must negotiate the relationship of the firm to the ruthless new regime. Greed and desperation drive the family members to acts of opportunism, cowardice, moral compromise and cruelty, as the Nazis work swiftly to consolidate their power and control.

Working with the set designer Patrick Bannwart and with Ulrich Eh, who did the lighting, Mr. Bösch has created a focused and absorbing theatrical experience. A long banquet table that symbolizes the staid domesticity of the von Essenbeck clan stands on the otherwise bare stage. Family members, company employees and Nazi officers arrange themselves around it in ever-changing configurations that reflect the group’s shifting power dynamics.

The characters are starkly lit from above, and Mr. Bösch saves effects like fog and a gentle snowfall for moments of maximum dramatic impact. He has also pared down Visconti’s screenplay to a brisk, intermissionless 90 minutes: It feels both operatic and emotionally intimate.

Much of the production’s success boils down to the fine-grained performances, which are, on the whole, less shrill than those in Visconti’s film, which can have the feel of a grim Nazi soap opera.

The star of the evening is the Berliner Ensemble’s astounding new ensemble addition Nico Holonics, who was lured from Schauspiel Frankfurt by the theater’s new artistic director, Oliver Reese. Mr. Holonics, a young Leipzig-born actor from Leipzig, gives a savage, volatile performance as Martin, the amoral, borderline-psychotic scion of the von Essenbeck clan, whose bloody ascent to the top also involves pedophilia and incest.

Visconti’s opulent films do not exactly cry out for translation to the stage; Ingmar Bergman, whose existential cinema relies heavily on lengthy monologues, seems a far likelier candidate for adaptation. The Swedish master’s centennial year, which is now drawing to a close, has seen a slew of plays based on his vast screen output, both in his native Sweden and throughout Europe.

Bergman, who died in 2007, was also a prolific director for the theater, and many of his films show a debt to Chekhov, Strindberg and Ibsen. Given this, it seems counterintuitive and audacious that his daughter Anna Bergman has chosen to adapt for the stage one of his most experimental and purely cinematic works, “Persona” (1966).