Child 44 review: confusing Soviet bore

If Child 44 had turned out to be one of the year's great thrillers then the world really would have seemed like a markedly more interesting place.

Based on a very decent thriller by Tom Rob Smith, Daniel Espinosa’s film hangs around a tantalising snippet of Soviet history.

It seems that, during the communist years, the everyday grubby murder was regarded as an outrage that only happened in the decadent West.

Thus, when a madman began killing children around Moscow in the 1970s, the authorities urged the investigators to treat each death as an unlikely murder.

Smith shifted the story back to the era of the 1950s purges. In the film version, Tom Hardy has been cast as Leo Demidov, the distinguished state security officer to whom the non-crimes have been assigned.

Unable to toe the party line, he ends up being dispatched to a filthy backwater where Gen Timur Nesterov (Gary Oldman), attempts to keep order. It soon transpires that the murders have followed Demidov to his new location.

This is, rather, how the story should be. Screenwriter Richard Price (who maybe fell a little too in love with interlinked stories while co-writing The Wire) has buried that vital strand in a mass of unnecessary complication and poorly explained subplots.

The exemplary actors all do what they do: Hardy’s vulnerable masculinity swells at the brim; Oldman needs no seasoning to make the scenery delicious; Noomi Rapace is drenched in anguish as Leo’s wife. The gloomy set-dressing is sufficiently dappled to satisfy Andrei Tarkovsky. But the story is a confusing bore that leads achingly slowly to a solution as perfunctory as it is implausible.

Child 44 is not one of the year's great thrillers. It is a grim disappointment that needed only a few tweaks in the script to become something special.

The closing scenes pointing conspicuously towards a sequel could hardly be more poignant. Samizdat verses by dissident poets had a better chance of generating long-running franchises.