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We have myriad euphemisms for how someone dies ahead of his time, but murder by any other name is still a ghastly business in the politically charged thriller Child 44 and other mysteries set abroad.
Based on the acclaimed novel by Tom Rob Smith, Child 44 follows disgraced secret-police agent Leo Demidov (Tom Hardy) and his wife, Raisa (Noomi Rapace), as they uncover a serial killer who preys on young boys. The couple finds an ally in General Mikhail Nesterov (Gary Oldman), himself an anomaly among countrymen who insist such crimes do not exist under Communist rule. “I’m sure you realize, murder is strictly a capitalist disease,” one intones in the trailer. The film co-stars Joel Kinnaman, Charles Dance, and Vincent Cassel, and opens April 17.
Real-life killer Andrei Chikatilo, the so-called Rostov Ripper, inspired the books Child 44 and The Killer Department, by Robert Cullen, itself the basis for the 1995 TV film “Citizen X.” Chikatilo in 1992 was convicted of slaying more than fifty women and children in the Soviet Union from 1978 to 1990, but the bureaucracy and paranoia of that era hampered investigators’ efforts.
American-based mysteries have their share of characters who find seedy cracks in iconic cities and weave cultural critiques into their narratives. Foreign-set thrillers add the fascination of an unfamiliar society, and they’re often as subtle as blood splattered on snow.
“They serve up digestible slices of culture and history at the same time as giving you the pleasure of an old-fashioned page-turner. The marriage works well because in crime, after all, the backdrop is always one of the lead characters,” The Guardian once observed. “Ross Macdonald told his readers far more about the underbelly of California than he ever did about Lew Archer. We read Scandinavian crime fiction largely because we’re fascinated by countries simultaneously so similar yet different to ours.”
At Word and Film today, I highlight a selection of thrillers such as Gorky Park, Wallander, Headhunters, and Smilla’s Sense of Snow that looked at a bleak landscape and found ice in the human heart.