Review of Alisa Khazanova’s film “White List”

In theaters is Alisa Khazanova’s film “The White List,” an “anti-detective,” as the director herself defined its genre. Mikhail Trofimenkov considers it a significant and well-made statement about “the lot of man” – a statement that is naturally sad and pessimistic.

At the beginning of the film, you cannot get rid of a kind of audio aftertaste of the song of the group “Zveri”, which does not sound on the screen, and cannot sound in the universe of Alisa Khazanova. Yes, yes, on the screen are those very “districts, blocks, residential areas” of Podolsk near Moscow, in no case slums, but completely habitable spaces, in which, however, for some reason it is impossible to live. This is in no way “chernukha”. High school students Anya and Camilla may even feel that, as in the song, they are “leaving gracefully.” Although there can be nothing beautiful about falling from the roof of a Podolsk high-rise building.

Anya’s death, in which no matter how hard one tried to find anything criminal, would have remained a line in the chronicle of events if it had not been for the media hysteria that happened around her. An article appears in a federal newspaper about teenage “death groups” and that same “white list” in which the occult curators of the groups include teenagers who have been brought close to the brink of suicide. And it doesn’t matter that the fantasies of the hysterical journalist and Anya’s mother about the already 130 children who have fallen victims to “death groups” are not based on any facts. Public hype is public hype, and now two Moscow investigators have been sent to Podolsk – Sergei (Alexey Serebryakov) and Zhenya (Vladimir Averyanov). They were given the task of closing the case in almost a couple of days and extinguishing the information frenzy.

The script by Roman Volobuev is based on the real events of May 2016, when a conspiracy article in Novaya Gazeta (for some reason called Komsomolskaya Pravda in the film) told about a “death group” with the unthinkable name “Blue Whale”. In general, that publication, designed in the genre of “urban legend,” shone with such outright madness that it resembled an excellent script for David Lynch or David Fincher, with whose films critics unanimously compare “The White List.” But, as they say, a sediment remains. Like: “Blue Whale,” okay, there wasn’t, but there was something. It is this “something” that the film’s heroes are doomed to chase. And not for days or even months, but for years.

The role of Sergei is the best in a long time in Serebryakov’s filmography. The director says that at first he rejected the script: they say he was tired of such brutal roles. Alisa Khazanova advised him to play with fatigue – and she didn’t miss a beat. Sergei can break the nose of a detainee – according to the “eye for an eye” principle. But he remains a knight of justice, who was convinced long ago that there is no justice in this world. And for a long time he was not surprised by anything – not even that his daughter was marrying a classmate. It happens, everything happens in life.

Zhenya, Rastignac from Vladivostok, is young, passionate, ambitious, engaged to the daughter of a big boss and sexually preoccupied. It would seem that he should have nerves like ropes, but no. It is he who will fly off the rails and stand on a par with Anya and Camilla.

The script is merciless and gentle towards people, perfectly put together and at the same time written against all, so to speak, Hollywood rules. The heroes get stuck not so much in the investigation, which endlessly bifurcates, leading down false paths and giving false hopes for a quick solution, but in reality. All the witnesses are not just lying, but hiding small details and shifting the angle. In fact, the life of any person consists of such omissions, such details.

But investigators are professionals, after all; they figure out these zones of silence and bring the truth out into the open, hoping to find the answer there. And yet they miss over and over again. They find small and even not too dirty secrets where they dreamed of traces of a huge conspiracy against children.

They also come across real criminals. Yes, the exposure of a pedophile brothel in St. Petersburg turns into an embarrassment. A private enterprise without any pimps was organized by tenth-graders from a humanitarian gymnasium. “Humanitarian education,” the operatives repeat over and over again with indescribable variations of intonation, spitting in the gateway.

But there is also a slippery Internet maniac, and a seemingly real molester of high school girls from Podolsk, locked up in Kresty. But this is not the same, not that, not that. And “that” that takes lives is still elusive. And doomed to remain elusive. Because lethal force, as that same “Krestov” passenger will explain to Sergei, is life itself. Life, based on the principle of either natural or unnatural selection, mercilessly using up the weakest, the most nervous, the most sensitive.