Child 44 (2015)
Certified: 15
Duration: 137 minutes
Directed by: Daniel Espinosa
Starring: Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace, Joel Kinnaman, Gary Oldman, Vincent Cassel, Jason Clarke, Josef Altin, Sam Spruell, Ned Dennehy, Fares Fares, Nikolaj Lie Kaas
KRS Releasing Ltd

The 2008 novel Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith was released to great critical acclaim and Ridley Scott optioned the film rights. The film ended up being directed by the Swedish Daniel Espinosa, who had previously directed the Denzel Washington/Ryan Reynolds action movie Safe House (2012), with Scott taking up production duties.

Child 44 effectively places its characters and the audience into the cold and paranoiac environment of the 1950s in Soviet Russia. Espinosa takes the criminal thriller elements from the original novel and creates a world that is controlled, where freedom is a myth and everyone is supposedly “happy”.

The film is set in 1953 in Soviet Russia, where everyone is literally paranoid and afraid of all those around them. This is supposed to be a free and happy society, one in which no crime exists and so the police force is not there to carry out detective work but rather to make sure that everyone stays in line.

When a young boy is found dead, with no clothes and in a gruesome state, everyone is shocked. Maj. Kuzmin (Vincent Cassel) of the MGB (The Ministry of State Security, which was the predecessor of the KGB) knows that this will mean trouble and brings in Leo Demidov (Tom Hardy) on the case. Leo is also the boy’s godfather and when the police report that is delivered to the family lists the boy’s death as a railroad accident, the mother is furious – a reaction that could be considered an act against the government in those times. One needs to remember that dictator Josef Stalin had listed murder as a disease that was only prevalent in the capitalist world, i.e. the West.

Leo starts to question everything but he must be careful. He had not always been so privileged and he had risen in his job and society by accepting and making up lies and twisting the truth. Now he starts to see the world differently. He realises that the young are very much at risk in this society and suspects that a serial killer is targeting children. When he is asked to investigate his own wife, Raisa (Noomi Rapace), he refuses and ends up transferred to a faraway base where Gen. Nesterov (Gary Oldman), who is the head there, believes Leo has been sent to investigate him. Meanwhile, the body count of children continues to rise.

All the cast try their best to look and sound Russian, especially in the way they pronounce their English. Hardy again delivers a strong physical presence and Rapace fits her role well.

The focus here is not on the murders themselves, but on the way the characters relate to each other, live their life and the dull grimness that seems to be their eternal fate. The interaction between the various characters, who are not what they seem, is also played well. It’s like watching mice in an experiment with all the characters trying to play out their life despite them being like puppets on a string in the Soviet system.

Child 44 is not a mystery thriller since from an early sequence, the audience is told who the killer is. The emphasis is to see whether Leo can succeed in stopping the killer from getting his next victim.

The film also focuses on the setting, which becomes another character in itself.

Child 44 reflects and becomes the embodiment of all that it is showing, as the film feeds on the paranoia it wants to depict to make itquite an unusual and performance-strong movie.