Citizen X (1995)

The early 80s in Soviet Russia. Policemen stumble upon a number of corpses in the woods. Most of the dead are children and teenagers, who have been stabbed, mutilated and raped before and after death. Nobody seems to care too much, but newly appointed forensics scientist Viktor Burakov doesn’t just care, he is convinced these are the victims of a serial killer (Jeffrey DeMunn) who picks out his victims from the young and the destitute in railway stations. He is even be able to convince his direct superior, Colonel Fetisov (Donald Sutherland) of the truth of his conclusion, so Fetisov makes Burakov an actual policeman and gives the case to him. However, this being the Soviet bureaucracy in its worst phase, Fetisov has other bureaucrats to appease. It doesn’t help that Burakov has somehow managed not to learn some basic techniques of survival, like never saying what one truly thinks to hard-line bureaucrats, so he early on actively antagonizes exactly the sort of people who’ll go out of their way to put stones in his way for the next decade, a mounting pile of bodies be damned.

Then there’s the little problem that serial killers are obviously a product of the decadent Western lifestyle and just don’t exist in the USSR, so there’s no infrastructure at all to deal with a case like this, even if the bureaucracy were able to accept it. Instead, Burakov is ordered to round up “known homosexuals” and has to listen to complaints about investigating party members in good standing. Despite a heavy psychological and personal toll, the hatred of his superiors except Fetisov - who increasingly becomes his ally and friend - and little resources, Burakov keeps on the case over years, until the dawning of perestroika makes it possible for him to take steps that can lead to the apprehension of the killer.

(Freely) based on the actual case of the serial killer Andrei Chikatilo and the men who tried to catch him, Chris Gerolmo’s HBO TV movie is an exceptional film. Well, except for the absurd – and given the high standards of the rest of the production patently ridiculous – decision to have the actors play their roles with fake Russian accents, the sort of thing that’s okay – yet still stupid – in a pulp fantasy context but that’s tonally completely out of whack with a film like this.

For the film plays out as a dark, earnest, character-based police procedural without action scenes and little on-screen violence, with the wrinkle that in its historical context, quite a bit of the procedural aspect is political in nature and concerned with Burakov’s first surprised, then angry and later depressed attempts to get the Soviet bureaucracy to see reason, something no bureaucracy tends to be well equipped for at the best of times and in the best of places – and the USSR in the 80s certainly was not the best of much. Through Burakov’s eyes, the film paints a picture of the USSR of the time as a place of quiet desperation where the greyness of the surroundings seems to wash into the minds of people who mostly seem beaten and bruised far before the end of the Soviet Union, living as they do in a country that seems a lot like a corpse that just hasn’t realized it is dead. Obviously, this isn’t a phenomenon exclusive to a specific time and place, and it is therefor not difficult at all to also apply the film’s view to other times and places – and not just under strictly totalitarian systems – where a culture of not seeing, not speaking, and scapegoating dominates; not always as obviously and heavily as in the film, but “not as bad as a utopian dream gone bad” isn’t much of a compliment.

However, despite its bleak portrayal of Soviet life, Citizen X isn’t a hopeless film. It also shows how Burakov’s tenacity and passion (and how Communist is the idea of this guy spending his whole life to improve that of his community?) slowly burns through Fetisov’s detached cynicism and turns that effective functionary into a human being again; and in the end, it also shows them catching Chikatilo.

Its treatment of Chikatilo – with whom we spend a few scenes from time to time during the investigation – is very typical of the film. Instead of going through melodramatic contortions and portraying him as a monster with the usual eye-rolling and “quid pro quo, Clarice”-ing, the film and DeMunn characterize him in a much more disturbing way: as a small, sad, pathetic man committing monstrous acts for reasons he clearly can’t fully comprehend, inadvertently enabled by a time and place that can’t even find enough passion to care about dozens of murdered children.


The acting is generally excellent, with half a dozen brilliant performances, all lacking in showiness yet full of nuance and a feeling of human veracity so strong, after twenty minutes or so I didn’t even hear the stupid accents anymore because I was too engrossed in what the characters were saying, what they could only express through their body languages, and why.