CHILD 44
DIRECTOR: Daniel Espinosa
CAST: Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace, Gary Oldman, Joel Kinnaman, Fares Fares, Paddy Consadine, Vincent Cassel
CLASSIFICATION: 16 V
RUNNING TIME: 137 minutes
RATING: ***
ANCHORED by two strong lead performances, this film is nothing like the serial killer thriller the trailer suggests. In fact, it is nothing like what you think you are going to get.
Schooled in the narrative of the serial killer familiar to us because of Dexter, Hannibal and Criminal Minds and films like Se7en and Silence of the Lambs, we are primed to expect thrills, gore, blood and twisted behaviour.
The trailer tells you the storyline – a security officer tries to investigate the killing of a child and keeps on even when he is exiled to the back of beyond. But that plot – taken from Tom Rob Smith’s book of the same name – is just the underpinning to what is explored.
Instead, we get a character study about 1950s Russians living in a world in which Stalin insisted: “There is no murder in paradise.” We see how the paranoia engendered by politics insidiously affects everything from how people relate to each other to how crimes are investigated.
Director Daniel Espinosa again (he did Easy Money and Safe House) concentrates on characterisation and recreating an atmosphere from a specific moment in time.
Tom Hardy and Noomi Rapace have good chemistry – they are believable as non-Hollywood type of Russki who are normally swilling vodka and eating borscht.
Hardy is idealistic Leo Demidov, a decorated World War II hero, now living the good life as an intelligence officer, toeing the party line when he is ordered to lie to his friend Alexei (Fares) about his child’s murder.
Orphaned during the 1930s famine in the Ukraine, Leo was adopted by a soldier who gave him a new identity and purpose. He is tough, narrow-minded, focused and sincerely believes in the order provided by his bosses.
Jon Ekstrand’s sparse score is a delicate counterpoint to Leo’s practical brutality and the well-cast supporting actors each present his character with a chance to show a different aspect of himself. The casual way he ignores subordinate Vasili (Kinnaman) spurs the young officer on to supplant his superior out of jealousy, yet Leo really doesn’t see the threat because he thinks everyone believes as sincerely as he does.
Leo loves recounting how he met his wife, how she lied about her name and how he tracked her down. But, from Raisa’s (Rapace) perspective that lie was not about being coy, she was trying avoid the security guy and eventually felt trapped into marrying him.
The Russian woman of the 1950s was taken out of the kitchen and thrust into the modern workplace – still treated as the second-class citizen who had to raise the children and run the home and whose worth was bound up in the honour of her husband – but now she had to also have a career while doing all of that.
Raisa follows Leo when he is exiled for not denouncing her as a spy and the storyline seems to literally wander all over the place as the couple move around. Ultimately though, it does make sense and the plot does tie together neatly. Still, this meandering through what eventually becomes a labyrinth of a story slows the film down considerably.
Trying to impress our own lens on the story though is counter-productive; it fictionalises a different way of life and trying to interpret it through the very egocentric Western ideal of what serial killers, marriage, heroes and police are supposed to be like, is not going to work.
The tension lies not in the hunt for the killer, but between Leo and Raisa and what the pursuit of the truth means for their relationship. The quest for what happened to the children is anathema to the way people around them think and this is a story about how an entire people’s world view is changed by changing the political narrative, and therefore the way they are allowed to describe and see the world.
The film is about choices and when we eventually find the killer, we realise he comes from a similar background to Leo. So, just which is stronger, nature or nurture?
If you liked Citizen X or Gorky Park, you will like this.
‘Child’ bombing at box office and banned in Russia
Child 44 may have got good press as a book, but the film hasn’t and that’s not just on the critical level. It is bombing at the UK and US box offices thanks to the grim subject matter combined with a lack of the expected thrills a serial killer film should deliver.
What is more interesting and disturbing about the film though, is that it has been banned in Russia. Russian film distributor Central Partnership announced after press screenings last month that Child 44 would be withdrawn from Russian cinemas.
While the film takes its cue from a book inspired by a real-life Russian serial killer, it is a piece of fiction. But it is the overall effect of the depiction of the Russian people that’s at issue. The press release around the withdrawal of the film – issued by the distributor and the Russian Ministry of Culture – said screening the film so close to the 70th anniversary of Victory Day (May 9 marks the day the Nazis surrendered to the Soviet Union during World War II) was unacceptable. The ministry felt the film portrayed Russian culture in a negative light and distorted historical facts.
The statement also quoted the producers as “satisfied that our position coincides with that of the Culture Ministry. We believe the government must strengthen control over the distribution of films that have socially significant context” (according to the online Moscow Times report on April 15).
Russian neighbours Belarus and central Asian republics Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan forbade the film distribution and Georgia postponed it to October.
Had the ministry simply let the film be played though, it probably would have sunk into obscurity quite quickly, considering that Russian film critics slammed the film for inaccuracies, and most Western critics haven’t been too kind either.
The Hollywood Reporter cited a poll by Russian Polsters VTSIOM which suggested that while almost half of Russians questioned believe that realistic, socially important films should be made, 23 percent of them believe that films critical of Russian history and society should not get public funding. So, chances are the Russian audiences would have ignored the film.
The scandal around Child 44 follows hot on the heels of a dispute over Wagner opera Tannhauser, by the Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theatre – Russian Orthodox activists said the directors had offended their religious sensibilities and the culture ministry fired director Boris Mezdrich.
Like South Africa’s experience with Jahmil Qubeka’s initially banned Of Good Report showed, a not-so-well-made film that the director himself doesn’t think is his best can get some really great mileage out of public censorship.