From “Fisher” to “Chikatilo”: there are a lot of murderers on the screens, but few good TV shows

A maniac from the USSR is now a character who is able to create a big buzz around the series. Our audience has always loved retro, films about murderers also have a kind of attraction for the audience, and if you add the two genres, then there is a chance to get a real hit. So, probably, the producers think and are often mistaken.

First of all, serials are ruined, of course, not by the genre, but by the script, staging and acting. And in this regard, our maniac projects are far from hopeless. There is a suspicion that there are much more helpless Russian melodramas and films about military exploits than frankly hacky series about murderers. Apparently, this topic catches not only the audience, but also the creators. And there is nothing surprising here: in Soviet times, such crimes were not made public, they were overgrown with rumors and became a kind of folklore at the level of horror stories. Probably, here lies our collective fear, on which, of course, we can successfully speculate.

There is a lot of room for imagination here. The creators of Fisher, the latest series that continues the theme of serial killers, present the story of a famous Soviet maniac not as a traditional investigation of terrible crimes. Of course, there is an investigation, but its development is gradually shifting the focus from the personality of the direct killer to a much larger evil.

In the role of the latter, the collapsing Soviet system. Behind seemingly respectable facades, morals are thoroughly rotten, and children die, including from indifference, lies, the desire to hide the true state of affairs and secure their own careers. A trio of investigators (Alexandra Bortich, Alexander Yatsenko, Ivan Yankovsky) try to catch Fischer as if against the model of the police system, and in a sense become victims themselves, destroying their own families with work that takes all their strength and time.

The directorial tandem Lyubov Lvova-Sergey Taramaev succeeded in creating an oppressive atmosphere, but along with it, a sluggish development of the plot and not the most interesting characters, even the most important ones, are served. The hero of Yankovsky speaks with an obsessive Rostov accent, the investigator played by Bortich for some reason tries to pretend to be a feminist, the ostentatious duplicity of Yatsenko’s character looks too flat.

In the series Chikatilo, which in 2021 became one of the breakthroughs in the genre of investigation of serial murders, things seem to be even worse. The creators of the project seemed to want to show the eerie transformation of a simple Soviet man into a merciless killer, but nothing really happened. Instead, there is the acting heroism of Dmitry Nagiyev, who played Chikatilo. In each of his episodes, he seems to be trying his best to prove that he is quite capable of turning from a sex symbol of all Rus’ into a character that causes nothing but disgust.

And this is what Nagiyev eventually succeeds in. The actor is especially good in scenes where his character, as an experienced psychologist, removes all the suspicions of stubborn and narrow-minded investigators from himself. However, in the series there is not only Nagiyev, but also a lot of passing characters who are often confusing and who, moreover, seem to have forgotten to prescribe lines. As a result, the strongest side of the project is a spectacular stylization, but not an objective story about a maniac and his crimes.

The series “Murderer” is also based on documentary events, and the search for a maniac here is furnished with circumstances similar to those that accompany the investigation of the heroes of “Fisher”. The beginning of perestroika, the incredible apathy of society towards everything connected with the state, the police, drowning in an ocean of corruption and ideological attitudes, an idealist ready to fight the system for the sake of a fair investigation. “Murderers” did not become a big TV event, although they are devoid of many of the shortcomings of “Fischer” and “Chikatilo”. There is no cinematic gloss in the series, and it is this visual simplicity that allows you not to be distracted from the action itself and the characters. Perhaps, “Murderers” is a typical “Cop” series, but in the “Maniacs of the USSR” genre it is one of the most complete and clear in terms of the story of what contributes to terrible villainy.

What all our retro-maniac projects have in common is the clichés that invariably appear when it comes to another historical era. Investigation in the spirit of the eighties is the inevitable men in raincoats and with gloomy faces, dark alleys or gloomy forests, few smiles and constant conversations in raised tones.

But as soon as serials about maniacs are transferred to the present, directors and producers seem to be freed from the routine mandatory program and get much more freedom. Perhaps that is why the most successful projects about chasing maniacs have become serials devoid of obligatory historical details. “Method” and “Crystal” can probably be disassembled into repetitions and borrowings, but for fans of the investigation genre and those who want to tickle their nerves, both projects stand a little apart from other series devoted to the investigation of serial murders. Although here, too, there were some gloomy men in raincoats.

Published in the newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets” No. 28977 dated February 22, 2023

Newspaper headline:
Maniac from the past