Absorbing study of paranoia
Cinema CHILD 44 (7/10) GATEWAY, MUSGRAVE, SUNCOAST
THIS movie, like the book it’s based on, is a hybrid. Seemingly a thriller about a hunt for a serial killer, it’s really a grim portrait of Stalin’s rule of terror in the Soviet Union.
Perhaps that’s why the film has generally bombed around the world.
People expecting a thriller are confronted by a long, bleak portrait of what it was like to live under the bloody dictator’s rule.
Despite the relative lack of thrills, I would, to a degree, like to go against the tide of hostile critical opinion. I found the film uneven at times, and the Russified English accents are a bit rich, but in general this is an absorbing movie – with 1950s Russian locations photographed in all their ravishing decrepitude by Oliver Wood – about a period of history that rarely finds its way on to our screens.
If it suited Stalin, two and two would add up to five. If you didn’t agree, you were set for the gulag – or worse. During the dictator’s bloody period in power (1926 to 1953), the state was determined to break the idea of an objective truth and to impose on everyone the acceptance of official falsehood, all in the service of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
This, in the smallest of nutshells, is the political and philosophical backdrop to this film, which is an adaptation of Tom Rob Smith’s 2008 bestselling novel.
The action begins in the Holodomor genocide/famine in the Ukraine in 1933 and finishes 20 years later when Nikita Khrushchev was just beginning the process of de-Stalinisation.
The guts of the narrative concerns what we would today call the serial killings of a succession of children – 44 in all – which the regime could not describe as murders, much less the work of a serial killer, but rather as “accidents”. After all, crime could only take place in the decadent West. As a number of characters repeat in the movie, “there can be no murders in paradise”.
Child 44 is the story of how a low-ranking security policeman, Leo Demidov (Tom Hardy), is confronted by a dilemma. Beginning as a faithful operative, devoted to party doctrine, he gradually begins to see that crime does exist, that many of the arrests he effects are the result of purges and that confessions are extorted simply to notch up a quota of arrests, executions and imprisonments.
Hardy, a wonderful young British actor, gives a strong, brooding performance as the conflicted Leo, who finds himself exiled from Moscow after refusing to denounce his agonised wife, Raisa (the excellent Noomi Rapace), who only married him because she was terrified of turning him down.
There’s also a fine supporting performance from Gary Oldman as Leo’s boss in the provinces.
Child 44 may not quite crack it as a thriller, but it certainly hits the mark as a study of paranoia and false consciousness in Stalin’s Russia.