Prepare yourself for "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days."

The Romanian drama, which won the Palme d'Or last year at Cannes, has been a sensation on the international festival circuit, finally causing a scandal last month when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences failed to nominate it for Best Foreign Language Film.

So viewers will no doubt be tempted to see what all the fuss has been about. But they should mark it well: "4 Months," written and directed by Cristian Mungiu, is unlike anything they've seen in a theater before. Tough, unsparing, unexpectedly poetic, this shattering drama about a young woman obtaining an illegal abortion during the Ceausescu regime is sure to upend assumptions about what constitutes cinema and art itself.

A harrowingly naturalistic portrait of how tyranny seeps into and distorts the lives of the citizens it touches, "4 Months" can't be described as fun to watch. But for filmgoers who care passionately about the future of cinema, its possibilities both as a medium for storytelling and profoundly emotional connection, "4 Months" gives reason to cheer.

It's 1987, and college student Gabi (Laura Vasiliu) has enlisted her dorm roommate Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) to help her get an abortion. The film begins as the two girls talk about logistics, money and schedules. We follow Otilia as she meets her boyfriend, gets a little money from him, goes to the hotel, finds that the reservation has been lost, travels to another hotel, and finally meets the abortionist, a soft-spoken, tough, ironically named Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov).

With methodical pacing and fierce attention to detail, Mungiu and his team don't just convey in a matter of minutes what it was like to live in communist Romania, they plunge viewers headlong into the reality.

Never abandoning his dispassionate, observant filming style, Mungiu doesn't turn his camera away in "4 Months," which graphically depicts an abortion and its aftermath (the title refers to the pregnancy's term), and -- less graphically but no less troubling -- the two women being raped by Bebe.

If this sounds repellent to the point of being unwatchable, it isn't, largely because Mungiu and the actors create such complex, fully realized characters, all trying to survive an oppressive system that watches and threatens them at every turn.

Although every member of the ensemble cast delivers a tone-perfect performance, the movie belongs to Marinca, who conveys a welter of emotions with flawless conviction. American audiences who have been treated recently to such consoling fictions as "Knocked Up" and "Juno" here finally have an example of filmmaking that dares to be honest about the high stakes of women's reproductive lives.