Only joy is behind – Newspaper Kommersant No. 26 (7471) dated 02/13/2023

On the more.tv streaming platform, the Fisher series was launched, based on the real story of crimes and the capture of the Odintsovo maniac, who killed 11 boys and young men from 1986 to 1992. The authors combined the popular true-crime genre with the gloomy aesthetics of late Soviet and perestroika cinema. Julia Shagelman found the resulting hybrid equally terrifying and mesmerizing.

According to the creators, the intro of each episode should deprive the viewer of peace, where terrible images – a dark forest, bloody bodies, pale children who, although they move, do not look too alive – alternate on the screen to a torn melody, in which it is easy to “Winged swings” are identified. Forget about the bright-eyed optimism of the original: childhood will end not sometime, but right here and now, the guys from the pioneer camps and from the dachas of the near Moscow region will not have time to become adults, their lives will be cut short in the most cruel and savage way. And although a short visit to the corresponding Wikipedia page will tell who the killer is, when he will be found, and what punishment he will suffer, the process of his search, stretched over eight episodes, from knowing the real facts, does not become less tedious and frightening. Moreover, the authors honestly warn: in addition to the main plotline, all the characters and events of their show are fictitious.

In the summer of 1986, the son of an international journalist (Sergey Gilev), who recently returned to the USSR from America, Igor (Stanislav Solomatin), goes to the forest at night to look at Halley’s comet. The case takes place in an elite holiday village – the house of Gromyko himself is just a couple of kilometers away. Instead of a comet, the boy sees a tall man in a dark hooded jacket with a child’s body covered in blood on his hands. Parents dismiss his story about this, writing it off as childhood fantasies, but Igor still calls the police to report a terrible meeting, and the next morning a mutilated corpse of a local boy is found in the forest.

Worried bosses (in addition to the dacha in this area, Gromyko also has a teenage grandson, and in general it’s not a good thing) calls detective Yevgeny Bokov from Rostov (diligently, but not very convincingly, “shocking” and flaunting the fricative “g” Ivan Yankovsky), who there he is investigating a series of similar crimes and must establish whether a “guest performer” from the south is operating near Moscow. He is appointed to lead the investigation, on which a young employee of the district prosecutor’s office, Natalya Dobrovolskaya (Alexandra Bortich), is already working, and later Valery Kozyrev (Alexander Yatsenko) from the prosecutor’s office, already general, joins them. It is no coincidence that this trinity resembles the heroes of the cult Soviet TV series “The Investigation is Conducted by ZnatoKi”, only in “Fisher” they do not have any friendly collective work for the good of their homeland. Bokov, with his provincial semi-criminal manners, constantly gets into a clinch with the intelligent, restrained Kozyrev, and does not consider Dobrovolskaya to be either an investigator or a person, because she is a woman.

In the course of action, however, the characters are revealed and are much more difficult than the first impression. The same can be said about the suspects, witnesses, relatives of the victims, experts, ordinary policemen. All of them, even appearing in the frame for a very short time and uttering predictable remarks (as, for example, the director of the orphanage, issuing a xenophobic speech about the black “children of the Olympics-80” who ended up in her care), still look like real living people. After all, the elusive pure evil that has settled in the neighborhood reveals its pain points and reveals its true face in everyone.

In its journey to the late Soviet heart of darkness, Fisher clearly looks back at Nick Pizzolatto’s True Detective series, which has already become a classic of the genre (only instead of the “southern gothic” from his first season, here is “Moscow region gothic” – a gloomy forest, dark gloomy interiors, skulls and bones, a reference to the esoteric craze that gripped the citizens of a dying empire) and David Fincher’s Mindhunter. Even the color scheme, especially in the first episode, is typically Fincherian and at the same time reminiscent of the Svema film, which was used to shoot films contemporary to the events of the series. All shades of slowly fading bruises – putrid green, dull yellow, swollen blue-purple – are punctuated by occasional flashes of red and sobering shifts to the clinical white of morgues and laboratories.

With these shows, and in general with any good “movie about a maniac”, “Fischer” is related by the fact that in fact he tells not about a maniac, but about the sick society that gave birth to him, imbued with a dreary premonition of an imminent collapse and total indifference: adults to children, bosses to subordinates, authorities to their citizens and vice versa. And despite all the long-distance calls, queues for green bananas, Czech walls and other signs of a seemingly bygone era that flicker in the frame, this context makes the series frighteningly modern.