When I was 7, I had a guinea pig named “Ms. Brownie” whom I left in a box under the summer sun because I thought she could use some air. When I found her baked like a biscuit, I was distraught, inconsolable. My older brother cooed, “Don’t worry, John. We’ll just buy you a new one.” This was my first exposure to death and life’s cruelties, and I dealt with it.

Somewhere between that moment in the mid-1980s and today, the world seems to have been shrink-wrapped to protect children against life’s inevitable darkness. But the wonderfully macabre new children’s film “Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events” realizes that children are naturally resilient – not to mention full of morbid curiosity. It’s smart and fanciful, it doesn’t condescend to children, and it knows the secret that adults are prone to forget: grown-ups can be awfully mean and often wrong.

I have never read this series of books, which I now regret. But the movie “Lemony Snicket’s” is everything I secretly wanted from the inferior “Harry Potter” movies – a sick, playful romp full of danger and innocence, with young heroes triumphing over the adult world. The slick Potter series, with the slight exception of the marginally more menacing recent chapter, is all computer-generated sound and fury, which never once puts Harry or his adorable cohorts in any kind of mortal danger.

The movie begins with a cheery animated sequence featuring a happy elf that is cut off prematurely by a dreary voice – Jude Law in his 640th role this year – that tells us not to expect a happy, silly movie. Indeed, he warns us, expect a sad tale about a trio of put upon orphans: the Baudelaires.

The eldest, Violet, is a brilliant inventor who can forge anything necessity demands from nearby scraps. Her brother, Claus, is an insatiable reader whose photographic memory recalls all the books he’s ever read. Sunny, a wee toddler, can bite, with four sharp teeth, anything that needs to be snapped in two.

The Baudelaire’s parents were killed in a mysterious fire, and the children are immediately whisked away into the care of a distant cousin. That the three are to inherit their parents’ vast fortune is of little consequence to them, but of utmost importance to their new guardian, Count Olaf.

Olaf is a preening prima dona, a corrupt bohemian whose ego matches his ridiculous dreams of theatrical glory. As played by Jim Carrey, he is a cruel, hilarious diva who looks like Nosferatu and sashays like Elton John. He mistreats, insults, and abuses Violet, Claus, and Sunny – who is given subtitles so that her baby talk is understandable – but no matter how much they protest, no one believes that Olaf is out to get them.

The first act of the film ends in a thrilling sequence, with the Baudelaires escaping the path of a train set upon them. This finally convinces the handler of their estate that Olaf is not suited as a guardian. But this doesn’t matter, as an incognito Olaf chases the babes to the house of each new foster folk, murdering many a host parent in his relentless pursuit of the Baudelaire fortune.

Mr. Carrey, who famously blowtorches the scenery of any movie he’s in, serves up a delicious performance. He shows off his comic agility in every scene, yet never upstages his young charges, or any of the gracious cameos (including one by Meryl Streep as an Aunt with a leech phobia). In short, he’s wonderful: a hammy, liver-spotted skeleton in love with his own limited talents and unquenchable greed.

The real stars in this movie are Emily Browning and Liam Aiken, who play Violet and Claus, and the muted, Edward Gorey-inspired production design. While not as precious and superficially adorable as the Potter brats, they juggle adolescent awkwardness and human dignity. The film itself is a marvelous parallel universe, which merges Edwardian architecture with the 1950s, where every sharp edge is a potential wound, and where shadows rule over sunlight.

In the recent blockbuster “The Incredibles,” the elastic supermom tells her progeny that the bad guy will stop at nothing to kill them all. These days, it’s a useful lesson: The world is an ugly, vulgar place, where parents and guinea pigs die. So don’t talk to strangers, love your brothers and sisters, and maybe, with a fort made of bedsheets, you can build a safe sanctuary high up in the creepy, unfriendly attic of a fiend.