Should have been better

Rating: Null/10 (29 April 2016)

Based on the acclaimed novel by British writer Tom Rob Smith, this is a thriller about the tracking down of a serial killer of young children, but what gives it a special atmosphere is that it is set in Stalin's Soviet Union (actually just before the dictator dies).
Shot largely in Prague, the film certainly manages to convey both the drabness and the terror of living at this Kafkaesque time and the work boasts an impressive cast list, including Tom Hardy as MGB investigator Leo Demidov, Noomi Rapace as his wife Raisa whom he is told to denounce, and Gary Oldman as General Nesterov in the provincial town to which Leo and Raisa are exiled.
Unfortunately the treatment is clunky and the accents distracting in what should have been a better transposition of the book.