A tourist guide to Hell

Shot in Copenhagen, the Pusher series is so dark and pessimistic that the tourist board must hate director Nicolas Winding Refn's guts.

The young Danish film-maker presents the city's lower depths as Hell on Earth, populated by Balkan and Eastern European criminals who, when they're not selling drugs and killing each other, are bargaining the lives away of young immigrant women as prostitutes.

The central character is Milo (Zlatko Buric), a middle-aged Serbian dealer and addict who, having found a stash of ecstasy, sells it to a man called Little Mohammed to pay for his daughter's wedding and honeymoon. Little Mohammed doesn't cough up the cash and Milo finds himself in serious trouble with an Albanian gang.

Buric delivers an extraordinary performance as a tired man trying desperately to save himself from the heroin he sells to others.

And there is a brilliant, extended sequence which I can't recommend to those with weak nerves. It involves a Pole attempting to sell a young girl to the Albanians, two ghastly murders and Milo enlisting the help of a fellow Serb who now owns a restaurant but was once a butcher. His method of disposing of the bodies is that of the abattoir.

The film is in both Albanian and Serbian, and there are hints of racism about.

But Refn says his moral is that those who live by the sword die by the sword. Whatever, this is a visceral and atmospheric work from a talented film-maker, which makes your average horror movie look like the proverbial vicarage tea-party.

Pusher 3
Cert: 18