Child 44

You can imag­ine that there were lengthy and heat­ed dis­cus­sions which took place before the mak­ing of Daniel Espinosa’s Child 44. Noth­ing to do with its intri­cate plot­ting or the des­ic­cat­ed Stal­in-era pro­duc­tion design, but every­thing to do with whether its pan-Euro­pean cast should all intone their lines with a throaty Russ­ian lilt.

You can nev­er sec­ond guess as to whether eye­lids would’ve been bat­ted had the char­ac­ters in this screen adap­ta­tion of Tom Rob Smith’s pot­boil­er doorstop all spo­ken in their reg­u­lar, unaf­fect­ed accents, but it would’ve cer­tain­ly made the scope for knee-jerk crit­i­cal pot­shots a whole lot more narrow.

Tom Hardy clear­ly has no inter­est in read­ing dia­logue to cam­era in his grav­el­ly every­day voice, and he’s an actor who enjoys the job of step­ping into anoth­er person’s body in a man­ner which is as immer­sive as pos­si­ble. It would be fas­ci­nat­ing to hear whether Hardy’s predilec­tion for accents is just a case of him throw­ing him­self into his job, or if he feels that each char­ac­ter he plays has to have a dis­tinct voice almost as a way to help him step out­side of him­self and make a more mean­ing­ful con­nec­tion with this oth­er (fic­tion­al) soul.

The inven­tive con­text of Child 44 sees the Sovi­et mil­i­tary police attempt­ing to make stark real­i­ty neat­ly inter­lock with the edicts of state ide­ol­o­gy. In this case, the sug­ges­tion that com­mu­nism offers its com­rades a sun­ny utopia where the pos­si­bil­i­ty that one man might mur­der anoth­er runs counter to mate­r­i­al truth. So when a child ser­i­al killer begins pick­ing off knee-highs at var­i­ous rail ter­mi­nals across South­ern Rus­sia, autop­sy reports claim that these vic­tims are being knocked over by trains despite bod­i­ly mark­ings that would sug­gest otherwise.

Hardy’s Leo Demi­dov is one of the state’s most respect­ed and feared inves­ti­ga­tors, but he seri­ous­ly blots his copy book when he begins to ques­tion the moral­i­ty of hush­ing-up child mur­ders so as the polit­i­cal paper­work is amply rosy and no-one is hauled in front of a trig­ger-hap­py fir­ing squad. Add to this the inkling that his wife, Raisa (Noo­mi Rapace), may be a spy who only mar­ried him as a way of get­ting to hob-nob with top-tier types, and Leo is sud­den­ly play­ing a very dan­ger­ous game indeed.

The con­cept of hav­ing a mur­der mys­tery which involves the duel task of the hero not only hav­ing to solve the mur­ders, but actu­al­ly con­vince the bureau­cra­cy that mur­der is actu­al­ly a thing that exists, is rolled out in an amply robust fash­ion. Hardy chews the scenery to the point where it resem­bles a sog­gy Sovi­et mulch, and his team­ing with a fiery Rapace gen­er­ates some nice­ly ambigu­ous chem­istry. It all gets a mite pre­pos­ter­ous on its home stretch, and the intri­cate scene-set­ting means that the hunt for the killer comes across as some­thing of an after­thought. It’s an unapolo­get­i­cal­ly pulpy dou­ble-por­tion of sick­ly-sweet Euro pud­ding, but all-told, it looks and tastes pret­ty good.

And in the words of the ever dili­gent Tom Hardy: ​“Eey hyope hyou hchen­choy htheez hlykeibly syil­ly fyilum.”