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 ...

如同弗里茨·朗、大卫·芬奇和奉俊昊等前辈一样，才华横溢的导演拉多·克瓦塔尼亚也运用了警探与连环杀手对抗的概念，打造了一部风格独特、惊悚诡谲、令人难以忘怀的叙事作品，其核心在于对特定时代的探讨：在本片中，故事的背景设定在20世纪80年代末的苏联。随着苏联的“公开性”政策和共产主义统治的终结，西方也了解到（并不令人意外的）俄罗斯也存在连环杀手——其中最臭名昭著的案例或许就是绰号“罗斯托夫开膛手”的安德烈·奇卡蒂洛，或者说是俄罗斯的汉尼拔·莱克特。基于这些以及其他诸多素材，克瓦塔尼亚和编剧奥尔加·戈罗杰茨卡娅构建了一个引人入胜的心理谜题，通过时间线的跳跃，揭示了所有主角行为背后不断涌现的全新动机。一切始于1990年，当时侦探伊萨·达维多夫正在庆祝晋升，却接到一个电话，报告的案件看起来与他几年前抓获的那名连环杀手的作案手法如出一辙……