The terminally bleak meets the hypnotically beautiful in the Russian cryptogram "4." Directed by the newcomer Ilya Khrzhanovsky, the film opens with four dogs carefully positioned on a city street at night. Nearby, a mounted light pulses an agitated rhythm, as does a loudly chugging machine. To the rear of this strange tableau, cutting across the frame like a theatrical backdrop, is a large shop window from which four dolls stare blankly into the street. A similar emptiness fills the faces of some of the men and women who will later catch Mr. Khrzhanovsky's pitiless interest, but for now, the night belongs to these barking, whimpering, torturously symbolic harbingers of social unease and untrammeled aesthetic ambition.

What follows is at once heart-racing and horrible, but also too genuinely shocking to divulge. All I will say is that no dogs appear to have been harmed in this production, though the same cannot be guaranteed of the human actors who emerge sometime after the amazing opener. The most important of these are Marina (Marina Vovchenko), Volodya (Sergey Shnurov) and Oleg (Yuri Laguta), three strangers who meet in a bar shortly after the four dogs go yelping into the night. During the long, boozy conversation that ensues, as Mr. Khrzhanovsky continues to wow us with his visual style, the three share tall tales about the world and their place in it, wrapping themselves in the comfort of fiction before exiting into the stark truth.

During the course of this barfly encounter session, Volodya says that 4 has never held sacred meaning for any culture. Sacred or not, the number repeatedly crops up here -- those dolls and the dogs, for starters -- though they never really seem to add up. If there is a deeper meaning to this free-floating digit, Mr. Khrzhanovsky and his screenwriter, Vladimir Sorokin, aren't saying. A well-known novelist whose name is often accompanied by the word controversial, Mr. Sorokin was the subject of official government censure and organized right-wing protest a few years ago after the publication of a book that translates either as "Gay Lard" or "Blue Lard," and that depicts Stalin and Khrushchev getting it on. Mr. Sorokin is often called avant-garde, but he also sounds like a hoot.

The film isn't the total bummer that you might assume, especially given its vision of a society on the verge of wholesale collapse. Its beauty goes a long way toward keeping your spirits (and hopes) raised, and just when it seems as if Mr. Khrzhanovsky and Mr. Sorokin are indulging in their nihilism a little too enthusiastically, the film swerves into full-blown comedy. The vodka and roast-pork bacchanal toward the end of the film illustrates everything that is both wonderful and tiresomely juvenile about the filmmakers' world view, sometimes in a single packed scene. If nothing else, the sight of a gaggle of soused babushkas laughing and smearing pork grease over their brutally naked bodies is not one you are likely to forget soon.