Like Fritz Lang, David Fincher or Bong Joon Ho before him , talented debut filmmaker Lado Kvataniya uses the concept of police detective vs serial killer for an excitingly stylised
, macabre and haunting narrative, that ultimately revolves around the identity of an era: in this case, the late 1980s Soviet Union. With Glasnost and the end of communist rule
, the West also learned of the (unsurprising) fact that there were serial killers in Russia too – the most notorious case probably that of Andrei Chikatilo, nicknamed the Rostov Ripper, or the Russian Hannibal Lecter. Based on these and many other sources
, Kvataniya and screenwriter Olga Gorodetskaya constructed an immersive psychological puzzle, jumping back and forth in time  
, to reveal ever new-possible motives for the actions of all the protagonists. It all starts in 1990, when Detective Issa Davydov is celebrating his promotion and receives a call, reporting a crime that looks precisely like the ones of the serial killer that he famously captured some years before 
.. .