mupdf worked like a charm! Any idea what makes it so performant (or evince so little)?
mupdf is, in my experience, much faster than poppler for complex documents, but mupdf-based viewers generally offer less features than those employing poppler's services (like Okular). These two things might be related.
Weirdly, it opens fine (but slowly) in iOS Safari...
Okular will do it, just takes a minute to do so. There are a huge number of layers to the PDF so it's rendering a lot of detail.
I could only open it with Gimp (which rasters it to a bitmap) on Ubuntu with the installed default software.