Child 44

Child 44 (2015) is a grim Soviet-era thriller you can watch online on iFILM. In Stalin's USSR the state insists murder doesn't happen, so dead children get filed away as accidents. Security officer Leo Demidov stumbles onto a string of bodies left along the railway lines.

Tom Hardy plays Demidov. His refusal to drop the case costs him his rank and gets him exiled to a bleak factory town, where he and his wife Raisa (Noomi Rapace) keep digging anyway. A jealous rival, Vasili (Joel Kinnaman), wants him gone for good, while Gary Oldman, Vincent Cassel and Charles Dance round out the cast.

Director Daniel Espinosa adapts Tom Rob Smith's novel, which borrowed loosely from the real Andrei Chikatilo killings and dropped them into the paranoia of late Stalinism. Expect cold grey textures, the grime of a postwar country, and the constant sense of being watched. Stream Child 44 (2015) online on iFILM.