The eight-episode thriller “Lighthouse” is being released on the KION platform. Review

On the KION platform, the screening of the eight-episode thriller “Lighthouse” has begun. Filmed by Andrei Libenson back in 2019, he, then called “No Man’s Land”, did not satisfy Channel One and lay “on the shelf” for four years. Mikhail Trofimenkov, after watching the first two episodes, I doubted that “Zamayachny” was worth taking off the notorious shelf.

The only thing that gives “Zamayachny” at least some comical originality is the off-scale pathos of the heroine’s off-screen reflections. “What is the point in black grief, in chilling fear? Is this a message from above to teach us something? But what? Is this a lesson? Exercise? Trial? But what do we need to do to overcome this challenge? Overcome your fear?

These are the questions, it turns out, that investigators of the prosecutor’s office for especially important cases, sent to the criminal village of Zamayachny, popularly referred to as Yama, are asked during their official time to investigate the serial murders of girls. And we thought that they were supposed to work hard to figure out why the eyes of the victims were gouged out and who advised the drug addict Kashchei to go “move” exactly to the house where the three corpses were found. Well, as a last resort, worry about what problems the identification of one of the victims as the daughter of the mayor will turn into for the investigation team. But no, Katya Mazurova (Tatyana Cherdyntseva) is more and more about the sublime, about “chilling fear” and “messages from above.”

Maybe the girl just chose the wrong path by going to law school? Maybe I should have gone to the Literary Institute and composed neo-decadent or God-seeking poems in prose. Moreover, Katya is also burdened with such an irreplaceable quality for an “important” investigator as memory lapses. He suddenly shudders: oh, where am I? In the morgue, honey, in the morgue. No, no, you’re not on the dissecting table, but came to the autopsy.

The immediate supervisor, of course, not only does not see anything bizarre in Katya’s behavior, but, on the contrary, is touched that the young lady writes literally every word of his in a notebook. In the same way, it goes without saying that Katya, who was born just in Zamayachny, experienced in 1990 – and the main action is dated 2001 – an inescapable psychological trauma. Then a certain maniac killed seven girls in one summer, and now, you see, he has returned.

In general, even without the presence of a maniac, it was not easy to keep oneself in Zamayachny. Village fools, icon-painting grandmothers dart around, seeing a demon in the demobilization “Afghan” Seryozha (Aleksey Bardukov). Even the population is not easy to determine: either five or ten thousand refugees, homeless people and criminals. “Here they are not afraid of guns, everyone is beaten-killed.” Seryozha, who has become Katya’s colleague, also raises some doubts. It will be seen how everything will turn out in future episodes, but it is unlikely that he is a maniac – I personally put on a police psychiatrist (Arkady Koval) with an oily smile.

Judging by the numerous domestic serials about the hunt for maniacs, serial investigators in the Russian Federation are selected according to two criteria. Firstly, they must come from the most gloomy and fierce nooks and crannies of the vast Motherland. And secondly, to survive, having come into contact with criminal evil in childhood, an incurable trauma. In general, in the world tradition, the servants of the law often experienced mental difficulties, but only acquired in the process of hourly communication with evil. And only in recent years – and in Russia especially intensively – the organs shown on the screen began to be purposefully completed with complete psychopaths.

If you don’t know that “Lighthouse” was filmed four years ago, it could be considered – the name itself hints at this – an imitation of Dushan Gligorov’s very good TV series “Crystal” (2021), where the same jerky spy returned to catch the monster in the depressive city of his childhood. Or even the magnificent and unbearable in its beauty “Spit” (2021) by Igor Voloshin, where as many as two mentally disabled – an investigator and a journalist – scoured the Kaliningrad maniac. But we seem to be faced with the paradoxical situation where the series, which seems to be a wretched and secondary collection of clichés, much more interesting than those developed by other directors, actually preceded both “Crystal” and “Scythe”. A kind of “Mobius strip” in the sphere of mass culture: imitation is ahead of the original.