A Machiavellian marvel which *could* happen in any leadership contest

Rating: 8/10 (25 July 2018)

The (true but slightly embellished) story of the internal power struggle among the top brass in the days following the death of Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin.

When I first saw this film shortly after its release, I proposed that it was likely to be the funniest film of 2017. Now we're firmly into 2018 and I've given it a second and third viewing, I can confirm that I was almost certainly right - The Death of Stalin might not have given the most outrights laughs in a single 90-minute period as other films but it certainly left me (and, as I have read, others also) with the greatest number of memorable moments that I can still remember now. You know the ones I mean - where you burst out laughing at silence and have to explain that it's because of a scene of a man spitting onto his own forehead you saw once many months ago.
The film starts immediately fast in a concert hall, escalates through Stalin's death (spoiler alert?), past the rigged committee meetings and into the culmination of plots, coups and counter-plots. It's funny enough to keep you ticking over with the occasional titter but every now and then it hits you with a proper belly laugh. Some of it is of course made up (like the opening concert hall scene) but Iannucci is keen to point out that some of its more ridiculous aspects are real - for example, Stalin's son Vasily really did try to cover up a plane crash that killed an entire Soviet Air Forces ice hockey team in 1950.

Unlike with past Armando Iannucci political satires The Thick of It and In the Loop, the array of bumbling officials shown to be smart in theory but useless in practice are given real names based on real historical figures - even though the film is actually based on a French comic book of the same name. A major difference to his previous work is that the stakes are much higher when a political figure makes a political mistake - instead of the oh-so-British punishment of embarrassment, it's a bullet to the head! This makes for a handful of incredibly dark moments (mostly at the hands of Simon Russel Beale as Lavrentiy Beria, the Head of the Soviet Secret Police) but there's nothing that overshadows the trademark cutting dialogue.
The unique selling point of this film is that all the actors retain their native accents for their Soviet characters - there's something strangely satisfying to hear Khrushchev's words in Buscemi's Brooklyn tongue or the feared head of the Soviet Army possessing a deep Yorkshire (Sheffield?) accent. Some have flagged this as an issue for the film but it could very well be Iannucci's way of saying that this might've happened (sort of) in 1950s Soviet Russia, but you should also expect similar schemes, plots and plans to happen in the corridors of Westminster, Washington ... or Moscow.