Andrei Chikatilo was a simple teacher and a complex husband who killed 21 boys between the ages of eight and 16, 14 girls between the ages of nine and 17 and 17 older women between 1978 and 1990 in Russia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. 52 heinous crimes, which he testified in court stemmed from “irresistible sexual impulses” that led him to kill and dismember his victims. In many cases, to ejaculate on her after using his knife as some sort of experimental sex tool, with no erections because he was impotent; and on some occasions to bite off and even eat their victims’ sexual limbs.
The sadly illustrious character was the protagonist of Citizen X (Chris Gerolmo, 1995), a notable American TV movie – which premiered in Spanish cinemas – with Stephen Rea and Donald Sutherland as the coroners in charge of the case. respectively its commanding colonel and with the mild-faced Jeffrey DeMunn as criminal; Evilenko (David Grieco, 2004), an Italian production shot in English and starring Malcolm McDowell as the monster; and El niño 44 (Daniel Espinosa, 2015), the most macabre and explicit, loosely inspired by the case and, like the previous ones, more focused on the investigation than on the killer’s personality, as defined by the New York Post critic in its headline as “a strange one.” Mixture of Doctor Zhivago and The Silence of the Lambs”.
More information
However, all foreign productions that suffered from his atrocities and the constant mistakes in finding the culprit. Until now, because Russian Lado Kvataniya, a debut filmmaker born in 1987 when Chikatilo was killing innocents for almost a decade, is the ultimate person responsible for The Execution, the first Russian production that, albeit quite freely, approaches one of the darkest social episodes of the transition from the Soviet era to perestroika and its final dissolution, forming today’s Russia. Premiered at the last Sitges Festival to great acclaim, it has been on the Filmin platform since last Friday.
Kvataniya’s film is structured in sequential chapters in which he plays with the five stages that patients with a diagnosis of terminal illness go through (denial, anger, negotiation, depression, acceptance), albeit with some modifications because there are seven segments here to its sickly atmosphere in a hostile environment, marked by ocher photography and a complex narrative with continuous time jumps. In fact, as a metaphor full of subtlety, these five phases of the film could also shine a light on the fall of the Soviet empire, another incurable patient portrayed as hell for sad and alcoholic citizens who give vent to their lack of freedoms with dirty and raw sprees, clandestine and morbid sex, in a climate of dogs and between devastating songs with an accordion in tow. Very free in its development aside from the actual case, The Execution adds other crimes in the former USSR and present-day Russia to the Chikatilo case, chiefly those of Alexander Pichushkin, the chess murderer accused of killing 49 people between 1992 and 2006 A character who serves the director to create a sort of cinephile wink between Hannibal Lecter’s help for Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs and Pichushkin’s offer to capture the Rostov butcher in The Execution.
One of the moments from ‘The Execution’.
“There are no serial killers in the Soviet Union,” assures Comrade Bondarchuk, Secretary of Ideology of the Communist Party, in the presence of Colonel Fetisov, General Ivanov, chief, emphatically and almost as a threat to anyone who dares to discuss of the KGB in the Rostov region and the city’s mayor in Citizen X. According to him, serial killers were just another symptom of western capitalist degeneration. Perhaps it’s the key phrase, not just of Gerolmo’s film, but of the others, including The Execution, and particularly the butcher’s lead. High-level interference, destitute, and blood and semen sample failures were used in the search for what were then called “deviants” rather than a “normal-looking” individual who is actually hiding a cannibal Another testimony from anti-communist citizen X ( available on HBO Max), this time by a high-ranking police officer, leads to the homophobic error: “We will continue arresting homosexuals. Even if it doesn’t directly help solve the case, at least we’re doing society a favor.”
“Cannibalism fascinated ChikatiIo,” his psychiatrist explained in court. “On the one hand he finds it something horrible and horrible, but on the other hand he has a mad interest in it and it shows up in all his fantasies.” Despite that, and the cinematic ferocity that could be achieved, neither of the two films closest to the case, Gerolmo’s and Kvataniya’s, have much bearing on the heinous practice, at least visually, though Citizen X subtly makes a reference to it Tears well up in the first report from the case’s forensic investigator and lead investigator, narrated off-camera with Rea’s face in the foreground: “The sixth victim had his penis cut about 2.3 centimeters from the base, with disfigurement of the genital area . Distortion reminiscent of an instrument no sharper than teeth.”
Chikatilo, who started killing at the age of 42 and until then had been content to sneak into the rooms of his school’s boarders to masturbate under his pants while looking at them in his underwear, was arrested on March 14. Executed February 1994. He had 57 years old. An officer came up behind him and fired a shot in the back of his head, the method used for death row inmates in the Rostov region. The then President Boris Yeltsin had rejected his latest plea for clemency. By then, the new Russia had understood that serial killers existed in the former Soviet Union. The worst of all.
All the culture that suits you awaits you here.
Subscribe to
Babelia
The literary news analyzed by our top critics in our weekly newsletter
GET IT
reduced by 50 percent
Subscribe to continue reading
read limitless