What an unbelievably sad film. The story of a teenaged girl living in a run-down housing project "somewhere in the former Soviet Union," who endures a series of betrayals that can only be described as Machiavellian in their cruelty, Lilya 4-Ever is a stunning tale of a fallen angel on a road to hell with no redemption.

Written and directed by talented Swedish filmmaker Lukas Moodysson (Together, Show Me Love), Lilya 4-Ever is an unflinching account of a smart, pretty young girl who, instead of triumphing over her life's obstacles as a lesser film would indeed suggest, dives headfirst into her unfortunate circumstances with an optimism that's crushed and deadened to a terrifying degree before she hits rock bottom, hopeless and alone.

At sixteen, Lilya (Oksana Akinshina) is a carefree teenager living in a low-income housing project with her mother and her mother's boyfriend, ready to embark for America and a new life as a family. But mother has different ideas, and soon Lilya has been abandoned (in a devastating scene) and finds herself turned out of her home and dumped into a filthy substitute flat. When mother's promises of letters and money turn up empty, Lilya' situation becomes increasingly desperate. At first she tries to make do, behaving like a normal teenager carrying on with all-night parties in the absence of parents.

But when best friend Natasha (Elina Beninson) turns a trick and then pins the deed on innocent Lilya, she finds herself turned out of her community and without a dollar or a friend. Her only companion is eleven-year-old Volodya (a wise Artiom Bogucharskij), a troubled kid she takes under her wing and the two form a sad surrogate brother and sister relationship, roaming around their abandoned wasteland home, sniffing glue and daydreaming about a better life.

The spiral descends as Lilya turns to prostitution only to be saved by a too-good-to-be-true boyfriend, Andrej (Pavel Ponomarev). Their whirlwind romance is a welcome departure for Lilya and us, but Moodysson has other, darker plans in mind.

One of the most fascinating things about Lilya is that for all her unfortunate circumstances - abandonment, poverty, prostitution, banishment and degradation - she still is able to push forward, dreaming of a better life "in America," opening her heart too quickly to Andrej, who takes us into his confidence as he does Lilya. What has happened to Lilya up to this point suddenly becomes almost inconsequential compared to the awful price she pays for her mistake.

The film's final reel recalls the tragic heroine of Lars Von Trier's Breaking the Waves, as Lilya unwittingly becomes a pawn in a "job" so cruel and degrading that it dashes whatever small bit of love and hope she'd nursed inside prior.

The film is just superb at not only chronicling the events that lead Lilya to hell, but at watching her reactions at every turn - moments when she's happy, sad, hopeful, defeated. They're all there under the close-up gaze of a hand-held camera that depicts a sad, grungy realism of two fragile lives with such delicacy it's heartbreaking.

Moodysson is smart enough to know that the events of the film are powerful without laying any trumped-up melodrama or heavy-handedness. Lilya 4-Ever, with its story of being young, utterly alone, forced into a terrible lifestyle no child should endure, is a difficult experience. We care deeply for these two lost children of the world, and it's painful to watch them make misstep after misstep. But without money and faced with a lack of any opportunity, what does one do to survive?

There are several references to America as a safe haven and land of opportunity and new beginnings, and one very telling one comes when Lilya and Volodya sit quietly together discussion a connection between Lilya and Britney Spears. For a moment, they imagine how Lilya and Britney's lives could have been exchanged, and we too can imagine Lilya, a tough yet smart girl, making it big in a world that cared enough to give her a shot.

The film is carried with great aplomb by two young actors who do remarkable work together. Suggesting a smarter and brainier Michelle Williams (Dawson's Creek), Oksana Akinshina is a marvel as Lilya, and it's the kind of performance that's all raw nerves and probing reactions. She gives us a complete young woman, with all the girlish joy of a carefree teenager and the sad defeat of a human being with all doors closed against her, barely able to stay alive. Akinshina projects an intelligence that suggests a greater tragedy in that such a promising young woman is stuck in such a terrible situation. And Artiom Bogucharksij is a low-key find as Volodya, who is younger in age but able to prematurely see a terrible truth yet unable to stop Lilya from stepping directly into it.

The physical world of Lilya 4-Ever, with its cold and broken down buildings, filthy living conditions, palpable stench of decay in the air of a world broken first by economy and then by barbarism, is accurately captured by cinematographer Ulf Brantas in a grimy, gritty look that suggests a decrepit war zone as a homeland.

If there's anything in the film that doesn't quite work, it's an otherworldly, dream-like quality to some of the closing scenes, where Lilya and Volodya question the meaning of their young lives. The scenes don't quite gel with the hard-edged realism of the rest of the film, and take the story into a questionable alternate reality.

Lilya 4-Ever is a rough film, with humiliating sex and violence that's not at all gratuitous, but more a comment on the matter-of-fact reality of survival on the edge of a world that's left you for dead. As Lilya finds out by the end of the film, what's left to live for if every one has discarded you and used you up until there's nothing left? What's the compelling reason not to just give up on yourself? She finds her answer in the film's poetic final shot.