October 2024 Bonus Review: Citizen X
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime
Andrei “Red Ripper” Chikatilo’s surpassingly disgusting serial murders.
The story
Citizen X, 1995's HBO movie on Soviet law enforcement's fits-and-starts pursuit of "the Rostov Ripper," is well built and watchable, but not quite essential – good, but not quite very good.
Well, that isn't totally true – for the time, it's very good, and for our time, when a project like this would likely stretch pretentiously over six to eight episodes, it's an efficient relief. Director and co-writer Chris Gerolmo (Mississippi Burning) does a few compelling things with shot composition, trying to sort of denature Chikatilo's (Jeffrey DeMunn) profound pathology in attack/murder sequences by zooming far out, or up. The film seems to understand that the case generally is one of those almost incomprehensibly horrific files that won't benefit from a straight overview, and wisely keeps most of the nauseating particulars out of frame.
Citizen X is best on the frustrations of the Soviet bureaucracy, on how teamwork gets created within a system designed to foster adversarial paranoia, and the ways non-cynical personalities can and must operate within that system. Here, it's newly minted detective Burakov (Stephen Rea, whose unvarying hangdog expression is indicated) and his ally in the power structure, Colonel Fetisov (Donald Sutherland). The acting is inconsistently accented, but knows where its story is, and that Chikatilo's historically vile crimes aren't as interesting as what, and how long, it took to catch him.
Of course we've seen the "fearful/arrogant higher-ups won't let our hero play by his own (superior) rules" story literally a million times, and when Citizen X focuses on that situation, it's a bit slow and by-numbers. But when it spends time with the specific people in the situation, dragging unconscionably on for years while various Party apparatchiks are allowed to muck up every aspect of detecting, it's sharply observed. Psychiatrist Bukhanovsky (Max von Sydow), wisecracking his way through genuine trepidation at getting involved with this albatross case; the exhausting fulminations of Bondarchuk (Joss Ackland), finally forced at kompromat-point to play it Fetisov and Burakov's way; and of course Sutherland as Fetisov, the very picture of "inside every cynic is a disappointed optimist" and not doing too much Russian Indicating.
Sutherland won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for the role, and the film won a handful of other awards, including some Cable ACEs and an Edgar for the teleplay – as I said, it's not essential, but it is good enough that you might give it a look, if only to see how a prestige treatment of a serial-killer story got done 30 years ago. Chikatilo's myriad ghoulish crimes remain an object of fascination in the genre, but as often happens, there isn't all that much more to say about him, or that – he was a monster who should have gotten caught sooner – and a film that understands this, and how to get in and out of what remains in 100 minutes, is worth a look.
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