I watch one or two movies a week. Many of these films are filled with scenes of copious bloodletting and death, but they are rarely very disturbing. For some reason, Lilya 4-Ever's brutality stayed with me longer than movies in which killing and gore are centrestage.

Lukas Moodysson, the director of Lilya 4-Ever, is a young Swede who has been compared to the celebrated Ingmar Bergman. His first feature, 1997's Show Me Love, was even described by Bergman as "a young master's first masterpiece."

Lilya 4-Ever is his third film. It is a harrowing one hour and 49 minutes of repeated rape and debasement. Moodysson once said in an interview that he had problems envisaging a film without a happy ending.

It would appear he has gotten over that particular problem. Lily 4-Ever has as bleak an ending as it is possible to make. Not that it has a particularly sunny beginning. In fact, the movie is relentlessly bleak.

It repeatedly hammers the viewer over the head with the message that this is a vile world filled with vile men and women; and that children are the main victims of their perpetual evil. There are no redemptive moments, no ambivalent characters. Other than the children, everybody is equally despicable.

Lilya (Oksana Akinshina) is a 16-year-old schoolgirl in an unnamed part of the former Soviet Union. Abandoned by her mother, who takes off to America with her latest boyfriend, Lilya is used and abused by a succession of adults: relatives, friends and strangers.

The only character in the entire movie who is not unspeakably villainous is 14-year-old Volodya (Artiom Bogucharskij), a neighbourhood kid who spends most of his time sniffing glue and looking for alcohol, cough syrup, medicines -- anything that will get him high.

Volodya becomes Lilya's only friend. But as is the case with every relationship in this desolate film, Lilya abandons Volodya to escape to Sweden with her rescuer -- a dashing young man she meets in a disco. Volodya is left to die in a doorway, clutching a bottle of sleeping pills.

Lilya, of course, ends up sold into sexual slavery, her passport gone, her rescuer nothing more than a pimp in a brutal syndicate. The movie ends as it begins, as a battered and bloody Lilya staggers through the streets of an unforgiving town, running from the police, who, she has been told, would put her in jail.

The soundtrack, a wail of heavy metal guitars and raging lyrics by the German metal band Rammstein, detonates around her as she runs. It supplies the death throes her bland surroundings deny. When she climbs to the top of a pedestrian walkway, just as Volodya once did, you are almost resigned to the fact that her death is bound to be better than her short life.

Moodysson began his career as a poet. His movies are sometimes shot through with a sentimental, almost mawkish, streak. For instance, Volodya and Lilya are portrayed with angel's wings, horsing around in a perpetual heaven. But the sentimentality never gets in the way of the grim story being told.

Moodysson has dedicated his film to the children who populate the world's sex traffic. Shot in a documentary style in Estonia, his film very rarely strikes a wrong note. He instinctively chooses the right actors to populate the script.

The main actors are first-timers and that is evident in the kind of verve and excitement they bring to their roles. Akinshina in the title role is a revelation, as is Bogucharskij, her friend and sometime guardian angel.