A real anti-detective – Weekend

“The White List” is being released, a thriller by Alisa Khazanova based on a script by Roman Volobuev, in which two detectives try to investigate the epidemic of teenage suicides and answer the question of whether collective responsibility exists.

Text: Pavel Pugachev

January 2015, Podolsk. In broad daylight, high school student Anya (Anna Osipova) leaves the apartment, climbs to the roof and, without hesitating at all, steps off it. Six months later, Moscow detectives – Korotkov (Alexey Serebryakov) and Lazarev (Vladimir Averyanov) – undertake a re-investigation of the circumstances of the incident. The arrival of the capital’s investigators is apparently connected with the publication in a federal newspaper of a high-profile article investigating the cause of the epidemic of teenage suicides. What if fragile minds are being manipulated by some curators who meet depressed teenagers through social networks and incline them to commit suicide? It seems like a conspiracy theory, but it needs to be checked. The further it goes, the more some evidence contradicts others, the overall picture does not add up, and children continue to fall from high-rise buildings.

The “White List” is inspired by Galina Mursalieva’s sensational 2016 article in Novaya Gazeta about the so-called death groups and, according to its author, the real-life “Blue Whale” game, the goal of which was to drive teenagers to suicide. Alisa Khazanova and Roman Volobuev began working on the script in the same 2016, and although “The White List” was filmed back in 2021 and only reached the screens now, the film is distinctly modern, in places literally in tune with today’s themes. In particular, the heroes continually ask themselves the question of the notorious collective responsibility: what to do when everyone and no one is to blame at the same time?

Although there are clear markers of the era scattered throughout the film (investigators, for example, are afraid of the ECHR – in those days there were!), and characteristic Volobuev jokes “for our own people,” this is not film journalism in hot pursuit, but an integral artistic statement. After “Oskolkov” (2017)the charming but in every sense crumbling directorial debut of Alisa Khazanova, the last thing you expect is to see a strong genre work that can be placed, if not on the same shelf with Bong Chun-ho’s Memories of Murder or David Fincher’s Zodiac, then somewhere nearby .

In essence, this is an anti-detective, but in cinematic form it is a pure thriller, in which it is not the result of the investigation that is important, but how its process affects all participants. The most interesting thing about the “White List” is not what the investigators will ultimately come to, but why this matter won’t let them go. Khazanova skillfully works with artists and uses simple but effective means (from working with frame size to sound design) to maintain the necessary degree of attention even when the film begins to get bogged down in a series of monologues. As befits this kind of story, the bloodhounds here are short-sighted and ready to build far-reaching concepts, but sometimes they are not able to notice the main thing under their noses. After all, it is easier to invent and try to prove that teenagers are becoming victims of a complex conspiracy than to believe that a child has decided to get rid of the greatest gift – life. The “White List” is about what comes from attempts to rationalize the inexplicable.

So there was no conspiracy? The authors do not insist on a definite answer. The characters in “The White List” are entirely unreliable narrators and inattentive observers, so only the viewer himself can decide which of the put forward versions of what happened is “true.” In addition, this is not the first, but one of the most successful Russian films of recent times, comprehending the space of the “anthill”. Footage with flights over standard panels and a scary caption that after 2019, statistics on the number of teenage suicides “are not publicly available” involuntarily evoke associations with the autobiographical doc by Marusya Syroechkovskaya “How to Save a Dead Friend,” which is also busy trying to find the reasons why young people are looking for ways to kill themselves, and how they can try to prevent it. They are silent at home, there is no answer.

In theaters from November 23

---

Subscribe to Weekend channel in Telegram