Lilya 4-Ever

Day 5/192-Lilya 4-Ever: Starring Oksana Akinshina and Artyom Bogucharsky.

My friend and colleague, Daryn Shepherd suggested that in this quest of 192 films, it was time for a foreign film to enter the fray. So here we have the Swedish film Lilya 4-Ever, a feel-good romp about teenagers in Estonia.

In actual fact, this is just about the most bleak, depressing, harsh and unyielding piece of film I have ever seen. Which makes me feel slightly sadistic for enjoying it as much as I did.

Lilya is a 16 year old tearaway, a petulant girl who becomes a nuisance at school and at home, mostly because as we learn in the first five minutes, she is leaving for America with her parents and is quite intent on burning all her bridges in Estonia. Very quickly it all begins to go wrong for Lilya: her parents decide to go to the States without her and then kick her out of her home.

Now if you are thinking at this stage: "Oh my god how horrible!" I suggest you avoid this film because that is just the beginning for Lilya. Lilya 4-Ever is regularly featured on "Top 10 Most Depressing Movies Ever" lists and it is not at all difficult to see why.



This film has pitched everything at just the right level. The performances of the two leads are incredible. Oksana Akinshina has got Lilya just right, her desire to get on with life despite the horrible things that happen to her is admirable and it makes it so hard to take as an audience when things go from bad to worse. She is arrogant and confident, but still funny and charming.

Volodya's plight is even harder to watch at times, it becomes obvious after a point that Lilya and he both have never experienced any sort of affection in their lives and when they become friends, Volodya places everything he has emotionally into their friendship. With someone as unstable as Lilya that is never going to end well.

The soundtrack is fantastic as well, providing a stark contrast to the gritty, realistic events of the film, it hammers along and tugs at the heartstrings equally, particularly towards the end.


Director, Lukas Moodysson, has made a film that manages to take an incredibly fragile subject and portrays it with the sensitivity and just the right level of explicit imagery, that the characters are allowed to soar, guided by the performances of two very gifted young actors.

Nothing that happens feels out of place, every reaction is warranted, every plot turn is well motivated and that just adds to the realistic feel of the film, which makes it all the more difficult to watch as this story is apparently not too far from certain examples of the truth.

Lilya 4-Ever is not for the faint-hearted, it's not a film to watch with the family on a Sunday afternoon and it certainly won't cheer you up any. But it is a fantastic film and very much worth the emotionally draining journey required to get to the other side.

9/10