"China is the future," the tired-looking government bureaucrat says to the female advertising executive over cigarettes and vodka in a run-down Moscow bar. "You think so?" she replies, intrigued. "I'm sure of it," he says, proceeding to lay down statistics about the inexhaustible Chinese labor pool. This is the most interesting pretext he can come up with for talking the woman into bed, and it runs out of steam quickly. A second man, sitting to right of the woman, smokes his cigarette and waits patiently for his turn to try. When the woman (Marina Vovchenko) finally turns her attention to him, he begins to spin a horror story. He is a military scientist who knows of the existence of a grisly Soviet-era program for cloning human beings. His story is rich with detail; as he talks, his eyes dart back and forth behind the cigarette smoke, as if he's reading off the pages of his memory. She is captivated. But is he telling the truth? Is anyone? By this point in Four, director Ilya Khrzhanovsky has already put the whole world on a slant, so nothing is certain.

We are in an alternate-present Russia, where the moral and physical infrastructure of the country is in a state of terminal decay. Packs of wild dogs run riot in the alleyways, narrowly avoiding giant bulldozers pushing away snow and garbage. Restaurants proudly display genetically altered animals grown for food. Cars fly down empty streets going 100 miles an hour. The countryside is all dead grass and rotting barbed wire. It's a nation of accidents and disease, losing control rapidly. The directorial talent on display in these opening scenes  -- specifically the talent for mixing surrealism with suspense -- is remarkable. The more the main characters talk, the more we start to question every word they say, and to wonder what kind of society exists out in the streets. We only get brief glimpses of the outside world, but because of the intimacy of the story -- the fact that some the characters are vivid storytellers -- we constantly feel like the director might take us out into those streets at any moment and show us more of what everyone has been talking about.

In the way that great filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino let the sides of their canvases expand at will, Khrzhanovsky brings plot elements into play long before they actually show up on screen, giving the film some comfortable three-dimensional leg-room. It's perfectly clear that this alternate Russia is in the pinch of some kind of military junta, just from the brief moment when we see someone stopped and questioned on the street. To give us more information would only make that fact less intriguing. A few small scenes near the beginning of the film are enough to set up a major set piece near its end. Khrzhanovsky is also able to use subtle comedy to hit notes that would otherwise be elusive -- something that American directors have more or less given up on. Take the cigarette lighter that one character uses, for example. It emits a flame on the scale of a small blow-torch. No one comments on it, but it seems like a perfectly realized example of something we would expect to find in one of those museums of ill-conceived products from Russia's Communist era.

We can also see the decay of the country's infrastructure on the sallow, frightened faces of the people. The creamy make-up, in the way it attracts artificial light and draws attention to a pale complexion, and the gauzy, imperfect focus of the camera, seem to scream out 1986. These cannot be random choices -- most Russian films made in the here and now look like they were made in the here and now. This director wants to accentuate the idea of a developed country that has stopped developing, and begun to rot. After taking us on this tour of dystopia for an hour or so, Four makes a sharp narrative choice. Instead of continuing to follow all of the characters that have been established, it zeroes in on the woman's story and sticks with it for virtually the rest of the film. She learns that one of her three sisters has died a senseless death, and must travel to the countryside to attend the funeral. Once there, she has to immediately bear witness to a gruesome ritual of graveside mourning led by a cabal of Orthodox grannies with no teeth and babushkas knotted around their heads. The women exist, apparently, in an isolated commune where they make and sell large dolls with beaded eyes for a living. The space they occupy, with wax and cloth body parts strewn everywhere, seems like something out of a Texas Chainsaw Massacre film.

This is where Khrzhanovsky shows his hand, maybe. We already know that some of his characters -- including the woman -- lie routinely about who they are and get a kick out of doing so. This doesn't concern Khrzhanovsky at all. Lying is an acceptable game for sophisticated people to play. His horror is people who are unable to conceal their true selves -- especially their inner piggishness. He gives us several shots of the grannies sneaking sips of vodka and then running flat-out with arms flailing, in some kind of nameless hysteria, to drive home the point that self-control is a complete non-option for them. We even see one of them throwing a severed pig's head into a pigpen, where it is inspected, and presumably eaten, by the other pigs. Khrzhanovsky seems, with this one shot, to be labeling the women 'disease-causers' -- a harsh label. His camera, in the way it lingers on close-ups of disgusting food being crammed into disgusting mouths, betrays an almost Trotskyist loathing for the unmannered, low-down lumpenproletariat who enjoys nothing more than making a spectacle of himself.

Eventually, the film itself seems to fall victim to the kind of degeneration that it is capturing. The plot goes into a ditch as we are forced to watch an endless orgy of old women ripping their own clothes off and shrieking like mental patients for no earthly reason. Why does Khrzhanovsky force this on us? Are we all guilty? It's a given that Russian directors feel entitled to punish the audience for its collective sins, but the sentence of having to watch The Golden Girls strip naked is perhaps a step too far.