Child 44 portrays the rarest of heroes

Child 44 is a finely crafted portrayal of one man’s commitment to honor, love, and justice in Stalinist Russia. Tom Hardy splendidly executes the role of a beleaguered hero in a land where the political machine crushes righteousness.

In 1932, a year before Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, Joseph Stalin and his henchmen engineered a hunger-extermination, known as the Holomodor, to punish Ukrainian peasants resisting communism. In two years, at least 3 million people (some estimates are as high as 10 million) starved to death, and countless thousands of children were committed to orphanages, many of which were no better than kennels.

Taking place 20 years later, Child 44 is a fictional story of two former orphans—Leo Demidov (Hardy), who rose above his childhood, and a former surgeon (Paddy Considine) who inflicts on young boys the terror he experienced in the orphanages. The film (rated R for violence, some disturbing images, language, and a scene of sexuality) is based on Tom Rob Smith’s novel of the same name, itself loosely constructed around the deeds of a real-life Russian serial killer. (The movie briefly shows a deceased boy’s gruesome injuries as well as a number of crime scene photographs, but only brawling adults engage in on-screen violence.)

Leo is an officer in the MGB, a precursor to the KGB. A loyal communist, he roots out suspected spies, but he does not abuse them as his associates do. He refuses to denounce an apparently innocent friend, foiling a political ruse and incurring the wrath of high-ranking apparatchiks. When he declines to endorse the official report of a boy’s murder, ruled an accident involving a train, his superiors have had enough. They reassign him to Volsk, a hole-in-the-wall a thousand miles down the tracks from Moscow, where the film’s dull browns and dark gray-greens convey the Soviet Union’s industrial hopelessness.

Weariness stains Leo’s face but does not hinder his resolve. In and around Volsk, he finds more dead boys, but he cannot abide Stalin’s oft-repeated mantra, “There is no murder in paradise.” Leo eventually convinces his new boss, General Nesterov (Gary Oldman), to help him investigate. As Leo searches for the serial killer, he must repel the assassination attempts of a former subordinate (Joel Kinnaman, a perfectly cast junkie Seattle cop in the unrivaled television series The Killing but awkward as a ruthless Russian intelligence agent.)

Although the movie does not reveal his motivation—perhaps it’s a sense of the eternity God has set in his and all men’s hearts—Leo is the rarest of heroes: He serves a country that deems him expendable, protects a wife (Noomi Rapace) who has never loved him, and rescues unwanted children being led away to death. “Believe me,” one official tells him, “these children are not important to Moscow.”

But they are important to one man.