Tom Hardy's tenacious secret policeman hunts for a child murderer amid the paranoia and terror of Stalin's Soviet Union
Tom Hardy's tenacious secret policeman hunts for a child murderer amid the paranoia and terror of Stalin's Soviet Union.
Get past some contrived plotting - and the needlessly thick Russian accents adopted by the mostly British cast - and this adaptation of Tom Rob Smith's bestselling 1950s-set crime thriller is grimly fascinating.
Article continues belowHardy's officer, Leo Demidov, winds up in exile after refusing to denounce his wife (Noomi Rapace), yet doggedly persists in his pursuit of a serial killer of young boys - an extremely perilous business in a state that denies the existence of murder, a supposedly 'capitalist disease'.
Viewed as a thriller, director Daniel Espinosa's film is sluggish but, as a portrait of a society warped by fear and ideology, it is genuinely compelling - and Hardy is excellent, too.
