Lilya 4-ever - Reception

Reception

Swedish critics were very positive to Lilja 4-ever upon its release. Malena Janson started her review in Svenska Dagbladet by hailing Moodysson's ability to address different themes and emotional spectra, and thereby escape comparison between his pictures. Janson went on to compare the directing to Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark, and found Lilja 4-ever to be superior: "What particularly distinguishes Moodysson's from von Trier's destruction tales, and makes it so much more gruesome, are the ties to reality. While we're sitting in the movie theatre and delight and torment ourselves through this masterpiece, happens outside exactly what Lilja encounters perhaps only a few kilometres or miles away from us." The film was fairly successful at the Swedish box office, although significantly less so than Moodysson's previous films. Lilya 4-ever sold 270,000 tickets during the theatrical run, compared to 867,584 and 882,000 respectively for Show Me Love and Together.

The film was embraced by most English-language critics as well. As of November 2009 it had an 86% approval from 65 reviews listed at Rotten Tomatoes, with an average rating of 7.5/10. It was rated with four stars out of five possible in the British film magazine Empire, where reviewer Michael Hayden praised the performance by Oksana Akinshina while comparing the film to both the social realism of Ken Loach, and "the darkest of fairy tales, complete with wicked aunts and guardian angels." Manohla Dargis of the Los Angeles Times noted that the image of the girl lured into prostitution might be a cliché, but held the director's honest intention as an acceptable excuse: "Moodysson wants us to see that there's a real person under the platitudes". She also noted that while the story might be unpleasant to take part of, the discomfort is surpassed by the sheer quality of the film: "This isn't an easy film -- only a memorable one." A negative review came from Sight & Sound's Tony Rayns. Rayns dismissed the film as melodramatic and lacking in substance, while also criticizing the stylistic choice of the dream sequences, as well as the soundtrack's composition: "The most extreme case is use of Rammstein's 'Mein Herz brennt', played at woofer-challenging volume over the opening and closing scenes. ... Even if we take the volume as a metaphor for the girl's wish to block out the world, it's absurd to imagine that Lilja would ever relate to or even listen to a Rammstein track in German. So the wall of sound comes from some 'higher' version of MTV, not from the character or story."