Child 44—Movie Review

 by Peter J. O'Connell

Child 44. Released: April 2015. Runtime: 137 mins. Rated: R for violence, some disturbing images, language and a scene of sexuality.

“There are no murders in paradise.” For much of the Soviet Union's history, this saying was accepted as gospel. The USSR was a “workers' paradise,” and such phenomena as murders, particularly child murders or serial killings, were regarded as products of decadent Western societies,

In Child 44, set in 1953, Leo Demidov, is noting that the deaths of a number of children do not really appear to be the accidents that official accounts deem them to be. Leo (played by Tom Hardy) is an officer in the MGB, predecessor of the KGB, who became an accidental hero in World War II when he was chosen to raise the Soviet flag over the Reichstag as Berlin fell to the Red Army in 1945.

As an MGB officer, Leo primarily pursues “political criminals,” but more-or-less motivelessly malignant enemies of his (Vincent Cassel and Jeff Kinnaman) in the agency engineer his and his wife's (Noomi Rapace) more-or-less exile to a distant area. Leo, an orphan himself, is not, however, deterred from doggedly investigating the suspicious deaths of the children. A somewhat sympathetic superior (Gary Oldman) supports Leo in his efforts to learn the truth.

After various twists and turns and some of the most brutal hand-to-hand fights ever committed to film, Leo does learn the truth—but has to put it in a deeply ironic context. Hardy performs his role in a manner slightly reminiscent of the early Brando. Rapace is sensitive, yet tough. Oldman is crisply effective. Overall, however, the film, as directed by Daniel Espinosa, is like the Soviet Union itself, bloated and inefficient, almost as if a final—and necessary--edit had been omitted. And that is too bad, considering the potential impact that the merger of a political drama with a crime thriller might have had.

“Footnote” to the film: Child 44 derives from a novel by Tom Rob Smith. Though set in the early 1950s, the novel is based on an actual case, that of the “Rostov Ripper” serial killings, mostly of young people, in the 1980s. Fans of the novel point out an astonishingly major change in the plot from book to film, even though the screenplay was written by the highly regarded Richard Price.