Child 44, film review: Daniel Espinosa's USSR thriller simply doesn't work

There is a telling exchange midway through Child 44 which sums up just why the film simply can’t work as the thriller it wants to be. The Soviet secret police agent “hero” Leo (Tom Hardy) discovers he and his wife Raisa (Noomi Rapace) are about to be arrested. “Do you know what happens to us now?” he asks her. “Yes, it is our turn,” she replies in an utterly fatalistic fashion.

The early 50s USSR of Child 44 is is a nightmarish, Kafka-esque society in which everyone denounces everyone else and “guilt” is endemic. It is just a case of when you are found out and accused of being a spy. Families and friends, husbands and wives, turn on one another by rote. Once prominent officials are arrested, tortured and then killed or sent into exile. “There can be no murder in paradise” is the ironic slogan in a country in which the Government commissions murder on a daily basis. That’s why, when a serial killer targets young boys, the authorities show no interest in investigating and can’t even believe such a figure exists. After all, when the state monopolises the killing, there should be no space for private individuals to intrude in the homicide business. (As Vincent Cassel’s doggedly loyal Soviet apparatchik puts it at one stage, “murder is strictly a capitalist disease”.)

In such a bleak and distorted world, it is perverse to try to tell a whodunit story with conventional heroes and villains - and yet that is what this misguided and contradictory film attempts.

Some elements here are effectively handled. Swedish director Daniel Espinosa (working with producer Ridley Scott) portrays 50s Russia as a grim totalitarian state in which everything is grey. There is no sunshine. It’s as if primary colours have been strained out on Stalin’s orders. During the final reel showdown, both hero and villain are so covered in mud that they are indistinguishable from one another. Stalin-era Moscow is shown as an oppressive city in which the dour expressions of the characters seem to be matched by the architecture and the clothing of the inhabitants.

Once we get used to Tom Hardy’s Russian accent (reminiscent of the one John Malkovich attempted at Teddy KGB in Rounders), his performance is stirring enough. He has the physique and intimidaory quality that has made him such a menacing villain in Bronson and The Dark Knight Rises. At the same time, he’s playing an orphan who can’t help but identify with the boys who are killed. In spite of the brutality he has witnessed as a kid in the 30s, a soldier in Berlin during the Second World War and as a secret policeman in the 50s, Leo retains a sense of decency. Hardy plays him in the same conscience-torn way as he did the husband whose marriage is unravelling in Locke. When his colleagues shoot a couple on a farm in front of their daughters, at least he feels guilty about it.

Espinosa made his name with 2010 crime thriller Easy Money (aka Snabba Cash.) He shoots action in a distinctive and inventive fashion.His fight sequences tend to involve juddering, very fast moving camerawork and lots of fleeting close-ups of knives entering flesh or eyeballs being gouged out.

The film’s problem is that it is pulling in two opposing directions. In adapting Tom Rob Smith’s 2008 novel, American writer Richard Price (whose previous work includes such novels as The Wanderers and Clockers as well as several episodes of HBO’s The Wire) is trying both to provide us with a taut drama about the hunting down of a killer and a vision of the Soviet state at its most hellish.

There is always a risk when outsiders tackle the intimate history of a country that they don’t know at first hand. (The British would think it very strange if a Russian director made a film set in Festival of Britain-era 1950s London in which all the actors spoke in Russian.) The filmmakers here, shooting in the Czech Republic with an international cast, can’t hope to match the authenticity of, say, a film like Nikita Mikhalkov’s Oscar-winning, 30s-set Burnt By The Sun.

It doesn’t help that the film has such a convoluted plot and borrows from so many different sources. We’re whisked from Leo’s traumatic childhood to Berlin in 1945, where he is pronounced a Soviet hero for placing the communist flag over the city. Then, moments later, we lurch forward into the 1950s, with Leo as one of the most dedicated officers in the MGB, the State security service. He seems to love his beautiful wife Raisa, talking evocatively about the day he first spotted and followed her, unwittingly using exactly the same language as if he was describing tailing a suspect. A scene in which they make love in a very perfunctory fashion on a creaky bed suggests she is less than passionate about him. Nonetheless, he sticks by her, even at the cost of his career.

The serial killer seems modelled on Peter Lorre in M. He is both very creepy and a figure of pathos who, as we discover late on, endured similar sufferings to those of Leo himself as a child.

Many of the characters remain underdeveloped. For example, Gary Oldman appears mid way through as Nesterov, the police chief in the remote industrial town to which Leo has been exiled. We have little idea of Nesterov’s background or his motivations. One moment he is threatening to destroy Hardy’s Leo, the next he has turned into his doggedly loyal helper - the only cop ready to investigate the killer. Oldman is too accomplished an actor deserve such a sketchily drawn part. Leo’s nemesis Vasili (Joel Kinsman), a psychopathic fellow security officer, is equally inscrutable. On the one hand, he is the embodiment of evil. On the other, he is behaving like everyone else caught within a very sick system.

Child 44 aims both to be both a star-driven, mainstream thriller and a meditation on the violence and bad faith of the Stalin era but it succeeds as neither.