Farcical black comedy about the end of a sanguineous era

Rating: 7/10 (9 June 2019)

Comrade Stalin is dying and senior party apparatchiks plot to survive what is expected to be a bloody transfer of power. The humor is very broad and crude at time with many of the characters played a bit 'over-the-top' (especially Jeffery Tambor's goofy Georgy Malenkov, which got tiring after a while). Steve Buschemi is fine, although not very convincing, as Nikita Khrushchev, as is Michael Palin as a weak 'yes-man' Vyacheslav Molotov. The central character, Lavrentiy Beria, is played by Simon Russell Beale, who mixes graveyard humour and menace as the vicious head of the dreaded NKVD (by all accounts (but consider the sources), the real Beria was even worse than the film portrays him). The film is a very black satire about hard, callous, and sometimes ruthless, men and some viewers may find the interspacing silly jokes with brutal and callous violence (mostly off-screen) off-putting. While far from a history lesson, many of the events in the film are grounded in fact and make interesting reading. The film would have greatly benefited by a little more wit and a little less puerility. The changing images running behind the closing credits were a both an amusing epilogue and clever commentary how things were done in the 'worker's paradise'. Next to convincing people that he doesn't exist, perhaps the Devil's second best trick was convincing people that he could be funny.