Share This Article:
by 
Return to Silver Screen Central Home page
Tom Hardy delivers a solid, self-deprecating performance in Child 44
B-The real star of the new serial killer drama Child 44 is not its detective, even though Tom Hardy delivers another solid performance. And it’s not the appropriately creepy killer (Paddy Considine) who tortures and murders little boys. Instead, the real star of Child 44 is the Soviet Union in the terrifying days at the end of the Stalin era, a time when the secret police were far scarier than any murderer.
Hardy plays one of those policemen, MGB agent Leo Demidov, whose time is spent chasing political dissidents rather than actual criminals. He loses his cushy post in Moscow, thanks to a jealous underling (Joel Kinnaman) and is banished to a smaller city hundreds of miles away. There, he discovers that the killer of a boy in Moscow has actually been operating around the country freely for years, killing dozens of other children. With the help of his wife (Noomi Rapace), Leo tries to find and stop the killer.
Director Daniel Espinosa‘s focus in Child 44 is on showing the horrors of life in Stalinist Russia, where everyone, guilty or not, lived in terror of being arrested as a political dissident. After being arrested, the real horror began as people were coerced into naming even more names of other dissidents, real or invented. Throughout all this, Davidov tries to do his job but is thwarted by suspicious fellow officers and a system that doesn’t officially recognize that murder exists. Child 44 is an often fascinating movie, built around a sincere, moving performance by Tom Hardy, but it’s a slow-moving and occasionally confusing one as well. Subplots are edited to the point where it’s hard to tell who some secondary characters are, But by the end of Child 44, viewers can understand the fear and paranoia of the era and setting in a way few mainstream films have ever managed.
In this scene, Tom Hardy’s investigation is frustrated by the suspicions of his new boss, Gary Oldman. Our full review of Child 44 is now available at Silver Screen Cinema.
Photo credit: “The Drop 35” by GabboT / Flickr / CC BY 2.0
Follow Us:
by