More of a docudrama about Soviet history than a detective story

Rating: 7/10 (25 July 2015)

"Child 44" is a highly fictionalized account of the investigation into the murders by Russian serial killer Andrei Chikatilo. The actual crimes occurred 1978 and 1990, during Brezhnev's rule. The award-winning book recasts the events into Stalin's Russia, but the movie is set in the early years of Khrushchev's rule.
The only reason to change the time period seems to be to make heavy-handed statements about Communist rule in Russia, which was dreary, depressing, arbitrary, paranoid, brutal, unfair and generally not much fun. But it begs the question of why change the time frame to Khrushchev's era, which reportedly wasn't nearly as bad as Stalin's.
HBO produced an excellent film about the case called "Citizen X," starring Stephen Rea and Donald Sutherland, which depicted the actual events fairly accurately, as described in a detailed Wikipedia article. There was a very active investigation between 1984 and Chikatilo 's arrest in 1990. He was tried, convicted and executed. The trial was a media circus. While the investigation was hindered by some party hacks, there was a major effort to find the killer.
The movie asks the question, what might have happened if a serial killer like Chikatilo had operated during post-war communist rule and the authorities refused to acknowledge the possibility that a serial killer could operate in their workers' paradise. Rather than focusing on the investigation or the crimes, it concentrates on the extreme measures the bureaucrats might have taken to avoid challenging the party line.
Along the way, it throws in war orphans, persecution of homosexuals, economic deprivation, the Communist Party's prioritization of children's education, sexual harassment by party members, professional rivalries, and other social issues. It also devotes considerable attention to the protagonist's background and his relationship with his wife and suggests it is impossible to be loyal to ones wife and family and also have unequivocal loyalty to the party.
His wife improbably becomes his sidekick in an unsanctioned, independent investigation and, as all Hollywood sidekicks must rescue the protagonist at some point, she participates in a donnybrook.
Chikatilo's victims were about 60% females and 80% children. His early victims were predominately girls, while his later victims were mostly boys. Vladimir Malevich, the movie's villain is given surgical training and removes organs from his victims, who are all male children. There is a very strange scene where the villain does to himself what he does to his victims, which detracts from the heinous nature of his crimes. They can't be that bad if he undergoes the same treatment and survives.
People are dragged from their beds in the middle of the night by state security forces, there are executions, mock executions, extrajudicial executions and summary executions, banishments to remote districts, train rides, travelling baggage class, endless betrayals, duplicity and much more. In true Russian cinematic tradition, the first cut of the movie was reportedly five and a half hours long.
The result is a stark condemnation of communist rule, but a muddled detective story. As a docudrama about life and politics in Soviet Russia, the story is meticulously detailed and offers fascinating visuals and performances for any student of Russian history. As a detective story, it is less than compelling and uneasily segues into an unlikely action story before wrapping with an implausible Hollywood ending that seems to have leapt forward in time to Brezhnev's policies of glasnost.
The movie bears the title of the book, which is misleading. Perhaps a fifth of the movie deals with the actual crimes, the victims and the investigation. The movie is really about the need for unquestioning loyalty in a totalitarian system.
The cinematography is wonderfully dreary and depressing. The costumes and largely Czech settings are more than adequate. As usual, Tom Hardy delivers a very intense performance.