Get closer to the fire and let me tell you about – He Who Turns Out the Light,Zamyachni and The Highway.
and The Highway.The winters here in Kazakhstan can be as cruel as the ones that I left behind in Russia. A windy day with minus thirty is no laughing matter nor are the ice-rink pavements, the early darkness nor the fact that you suffer from constant low-level flu.
To make it through this I turn to dark tales. Russian crime thrillers, courtesy of pirated DVDs found at the local open-air markets, are just what the doctor ordered.
Under the influence of Nordic Noir, a fresh `drama detective` subgenre has emerged in Russian TV and film in the 2000s. These show elements of psychological thrillers and are Horror adjacent with it.
Here follow three examples of what I mean:
From 2008 He Who Turns Out the Light (Tot Kto on Gasit Svet) constitutes an 86-minute-long cinema debut by the director Andrei Libenson (also known for the science-fantasy extravaganza Coma from 2012 as well as Zamyachni).
Based on a story called Dark Water by Oleg Osipov, this Non -Stop production features some hefty names in screen acting. These include the matinee idol Alexander Guskov in the lead role and Ekaterina Vilkova (no stranger to this genre, having been in Cold Shores and Detektor). The score is the work of the busy Lugansk born composer Yuri Potenko (First Time (2017), Inhabited Island (2008), to name but some.
In St Petersburg, goes the story, a killer is at large. He slays a young girl every Wednesday. The action opens on the second month of the investigation. The murders continue. Pyotr Moiseyev (Guskov) – the chief investigator is feeling the strain.
Then a suspect is detained. He appears to confess. Moiseyev has his doubts as to whether they have the right man but the beleaguered constabulary tell the press that they have triumphed. Following a tip, Moiseyev finds himself on a train to Svetogorsk. (This is a real town in the Kaliningrad region, although the film was not shot there). He discovers that the locale is overseen by a rogue local police chief who stymies him at every turn. Things lead to an action-packed finale where the surprise face of the real killer is unmasked….
The crepuscular look of everything. The dwelling on the corruption in high places. Guskov’s hardboiled lone wolf detective. Vilkova’s femme fatale – all screams `Noir`. This is represents a more American style Noir though and would look a little dated 15 years later. Nevertheless, He Who Turns Out the Lights is a bit of a lost classic that was more appreciated in select screenings abroad than it was in Russian cinemas.
Zamyachni – the title of the next thriller – had me running for the dictionary, but in fact it bears the name of the fictional village where much of the action occurs. Also directed by Andrei Liberman it constitutes an 8 series television drama broadcast in 2023 (after languishing in a vault for four years after production). This also began life as a novel, this time by Ilya Bushin.
The 35-year-old Minsk born Tatiana Cherdyntseva – better known for appearing in T.V melodramas with titles like The Unloved Daughter-in Law (2023) -shares the lead role with forty-year-old Muscovite Alexei Bordukov (Mosga 2, 2021). (It is refreshing, by the way, to find a story where a hero and heroine share the main role).
The charming miscreant this time is a serial killer with a fondness for gouging the eyes out of his young female victims. He has struck again in 2001 (when most of the drama is set) but began his deeds in 1990 – a time to which we get repeated flashbacks.
The two police Investigators meet up again in the process of enquiring into the matter. They share a tragic fate: he lost his fiancé to the killer, she her sister (both being one and the same). He is on an obsessive quest for vengeance. She, meanwhile, seems locked in a complex relationship with her mother and experiences blackouts.
Zamyachni itself forms a large part of the story having become a retreat for criminal elements. When the police roll up, on the trail of the killer, the locals hurl stones at them. (The title of Bushman’s novel is `No Man’s Land`). The proceedings, rather than dwell on gruesome details, lean into eeriness. Evgeny Federov’s score does much to enhance this as do the emotional performances of the cast. Cherdyntseva in particular conveys a sense of herself as being haunted. Most powerful of all though are the expressionistic use of lighting and sets.
A man and a woman both function as the heroes. [Dzen.ru]
Plot wise, however, Zamyachnicommits one cardinal howler. The culprit jumps out of nowhere at the end, without having been a suspect or even seen earlier.
In Trassa (`The Highway`), a 10 episode `psychological detective thriller` from 2024. It leads us even deeper into the underworld. The man behind the cameras this time is Dusan Gligorov who had already excelled in this genre with the TV serial `Krystalni` from four years ago. The scribe – who has his name on such cinema blockbusters as Invasion (2019) and Sputnik (2020) – is 54-year-old Oleg Maluvichko.
Karina Razumovskaya, a 41-yeatr old St Petersburgian who made her name in the TV series Major (2014 -2022) -gets the difficult task of portraying a troubled and sometimes unsympathetic protagonist. She plays alongside the 50-year-old Anna Nikitichna as a doughtier police investigator.
The story begins with a teenage girl in a rural area being saved from suicide after having shot both her parent’s dead. Meanwhile a female judge finds that her adopted daughter has absconded in order to search for her real mum and dad – but then leaves a terrifying voice message pleading for help…The two events prove to be intertwined…
The criminal aspect this time is a shadowy but many tentacled fraternity that has systematized the kidnapping and sexual exploitation of young girls. Their stomping ground is the town of Mineralni Vody through which the titular highway runs.
It is in this series that one of the most harrowing sequences that I have yet seen on either film or television occurs (in brief, it involves the date rape and abduction of a teenage girl).
For all its lush locations (it is set in the South Caucuses) Trassa is bleak to a fault. Some online commentators claimed to discern an anti-male agenda at work in the drama. For sure, if there are any heroes here then they are women and none of the men can really, it seems, be trusted. The female characters, however, are also caught up in the same seediness and exhibit some moral ambiguity.
These shows underscore what Cold Shores has already demonstrated: the Russians can create noir dramas equal to those which come out of Scandinavia.
All three shows venture beyond the standardised Moscow/St Petersburg/Nizhnynovgorod parameters common to Russian film and television. More than that, they hold up a mirror to the complex and murky underbelly of contemporary Russian society. This is quite at odds with the family-values-decency view of Russian life being promulgated by the Putin regime’s soft power.