Scandinavian countries are often seen as safe and vice-free; modern, modest, they produce the world’s strongest men, who represent their countries by lifting cars on ESPN. But for several years now, a renewed trickle of provocative (mainly Danish) art-house films has been challenging this rosy view, suggesting that if the world is engaged, as some philosophers have imagined, in a race to the end of history, then Scandinavia has some ground to make up.

Several months ago, this argument got a boost from some offensive cartoons. But the “Pusher” trilogy, a series of visceral, unsettling films directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, jerks it awake like a fistful of smelling salts.

Made in 1999, 2004, and 2005, and now being released simultaneously in New York, Mr. Refn’s three films paint a frank portrait of Copenhagen’s demimonde of drug-dealing thugs. In this safest and most laid-back of capitals, the narcotics trade has spawned a parallel universe in which the law of the jungle reigns supreme. Cocaine is consumed as casually as chewing gum, debts are collected using shotguns and home-made electric chairs. Postcard Europe never seemed so far away.

Relying on tight, handheld camerawork and an emphasis on (but not, thankfully, an enslavement to) natural lighting, the trilogy’s gripping set of stories unfolds with the raw immediacy of a documentary. But there’s also enough action to the give the kingpins of the street-tough genre — think “The French Connection” and the early films of Martin Scorsese — a run for their money. The stark outdoor scenes that gave 1970s classics like “Taxi Driver” their stamp of veracity, however, are largely absent here. The beatings and illicit transactions that punctuate the “Pusher” films with an almost metric regularity go down in nondescript bars, apartments, and stygian, soundblasted night clubs.

In each of the three films, the main character (a different one in each) is trapped in the same existential scenario: He incurs a debt from a deal gone wrong and must pay it back on a tight deadline. It’s not stupidity that puts the pushers in a bind: The drug trade is inherently a risky game, and even the smart players can get beaten by the odds.

Our first “hero” is an ill-humored striver named Frank (Kim Bodnia).”Pusher,” in which Frank loses his goods in a stroke of bad luck before desperately trying to make up for it, goes the furthest of the three films to suggest that the dope trade isn’t all that different from any other business. Of course, it draws a few more unpleasant types than your average sales and marketing department. Take Tonny (Mads Mikkelsen), a swaggering punk whose main interests are his own toughness and sexual prowess. Here is a young man who would be tough to describe at first (or second, or third) glance without recourse to a string of expletives. And yet when, following a disastrous deal, Tonny and his shaved head are bludgeoned to a bloody pulp, the satisfying closure this episode would bring in most movies is nowhere to be found.

This is a good thing. The “Pusher” series, which takes place in a cesspool of amorality and self-interest, offers neither its characters nor viewers an easy way out. It exposes Hollywood’s third-act redemptions and Dirty-Harry justice as pipe dreams: in liberal society, some bad apples are here to stay. By refusing to glamorize or try to correct criminality, these films — yes, you could say they’re cynical — are more realistic than any violent entertainment you’re likely to see this year.

“Pusher” posits that we might as well explore what makes the bad guys tick, and one thing that becomes clear is that they really don’t want a life that’s nasty and short. Part of them revolts against the meanness of the path they’ve chosen; it’s just that they’re too busy ensuring their own survival to realize it. Seen as a triptych, the films not only chart the overlapping routes of these men (and, to a much lesser extent, women) through the Hobbesian underworld, but also provide a sense of the long, battering experience that might one day cause them to leave it.

Tonny’s beating, for example, sidelines him from the rest of the first film. He reappears in prison in the opening scene of “Pusher II: With Blood on My Hands,” listening to an inmate explain that the toughest men are no tougher than any man who can master his fear long enough to pull a trigger. Tonny, we learn, belongs in the second category, and he spends the rest of the film trying to master his fear of his father, a crime boss straight out of the first category who sees his son as a useless failure.

He’s not far off, of course. But while Tonny does not get any smarter, he does begin to resent his father’s abuse and shed his cavalier disregard for his own illegitimate son (changing the baby’s diaper, Tonny finds, is one of the few things he can do well). As in the recent Belgian film “L’Enfant,” the central presence of a helpless innocent brings gut-twisting suspense: Will the infant stir its father’s conscience, or merely tempt him to do something sick?

Tonny is gone in the third film, which comes back to focus on a single day in the life of the trilogy’s original villain, an older, more established dealer named Milo (Zlatko Buric). The same laconic Macedonian honcho who put the squeeze on Tonny and Frank in the first two films is now in hot water himself, following a costly blunder with a shipment of ecstasy. The ethnic diversity of his antagonists — Albanians, Turks, and Poles — serves more as a declaration of human commonality than a comment on modern immigration patterns, as the superficial differences between one man and another are literally peeled off in the film’s unforgettable final scenes. One of them is reduced, with saw and knife, to his basic components (some of which resolutely refuse to go down the drain), and while this process tells us little about why he became a criminal, it does expose him as complex and predominantly dark on the inside.

Through August 24 (Cinema Village, 22 E. 12 St., between Fifth avenue and University Pl., 212-924-3363).