Red in tooth and claw

Citizen X (Chris Gerolmo, 1995)

Not really fleapit fodder but hey, it's my blog and all that.......

HBO do better TV than films in my opinion, but here is the magnificent, soaring exception. In a decade that, thanks to The Silence of the Lambs and Se7en turned the serial killer into the bad boy pop star, it took Chris Gerolmo's low-key, deliberate and angry Citizen X to remind the viewer that real-life is more shambolic, pathetic and terrifying than any face-eating, head-boxing a-list scenery-chewer can represent.

The film follows the trials of Detective Burakov as he tries and fails to beat the crumbling Soviet system which is preventing him from properly investigating the crimes of a child-murderer (known as Citizen X) in 1980's Ukraine. Burakov is portrayed with heartbreaking frustration by Stephen Rea, and as the constant struggle to improve the quality of his men and equipment, and the constant denials by the local apparachiks that Soviet Ukraine could have anything as decadent as a serial killer, beat him down, he gets closer and closer to collapse.

His saviour is Fetisov (Donald Sutherland, in his best, most noble performance in 20 years), an Army colonel given command of the tiny backwater. In time, Burakov's persistence in the face of overwhelming odds fires up Fetisov and between them, they begin to roll back the smouthering layers of Soviet resistance, getting closer and closer to the man that, by this point has killed scores of children.

The triumph of Citizen X is the fact that it concentrates less on the Killer (in this case Andrei Chikatilo) and more on the emotional devastation that his crimes visit on those tasked with investigating them. Rea and Sutherland are really extraordinarily good. It also portrays the casual depravity of Chikatilo, but doses this with the full measure of his pathetic life and miserable demeanor - no art-deco dungeons for him, just another freezing cold, crumbling railway station next to a nondescript patch of woodland. Here is the banality of evil, and Jeffrey DeMunn, one of America's most underappreciated character actors is mesmeric as the shambling low-ranked party man who's life is a pathetic sham and whom rarely lets his mask slip, but when he does.....

Citizen X deliberately avoids the splashy high-tech gore of the then more trendy (and more expensive) contemporary Hollywood product and instead aims for something much more disturbing, emotional devastation, and it makes for powerful viewing. Even Randy Edelman's downbeat, sombre score fits perfectly with the mundane apocalypse which unfolds in Rostov-on-Don. As a TV movie, it's exemplary. As a film about the banality of evil, it might be the best film of its type since 10 Rillington Place. Yes, it really is that good.