As a little girl in the bleak German psychodrama Lea, the title character has her beloved kite destroyed, witnesses the beating and rape of her mother, gets chained up in a dank crawlspace, and stabs her abusive father in the back with a fork. At this point, the opening credits haven't finished rolling. More brutality follows. Virtually muted by her childhood traumas, the girl (played with sharp intensity as an adult by the statuesque Lenka Vlasáková) is enslaved on a Slovakian farm by her adoptive father, who also beats her before selling her for $20,000 to German furniture restorer Christian Redl. Once settled in her new home, Vlasáková is again on the receiving end of regular beatings, then reintroduced to the handcuffs and chains that left such a vivid impression on her while she was growing up. At the end of all this relentless miserablism, a faint glint of redemption awaits Vlasáková and her husband/captor as they come to understand each other and develop a strangely touching relationship on equal terms. Though the story bears a superficial resemblance to The Piano, Lea is closer to the tradition of Grimm Brothers fables and existential German melodramas such as Woyzeck, which also require an extensive journey through the darkness before its characters can come out the other side. Writer-director Ivan Fila, a Czech émigré, is unsparingly severe in every detail, including a memorably discordant score that underlines the action with bleating horns and shattered glass. Whether the film itself is ultimately redeemable may depend on the viewer's tolerance for morbid shock, but Fila's forceful vision remains consistent and admirable throughout. If nothing else, his emotional payoffs are as far from sentiment as Lea's protagonist is to a simple grin.