Captain Volkonogov Escaped

Leningrad, 1938. The Stalinist purges are in full swing, and the secret police have set up shop in an appropriated Tsarist-era palace, all gold leaf and chandeliers, its parquet floors spread thick with hay to soak up the blood from tortured confessions. Young Captain Volkonogov (Yura Borisov of Anora fame) is tight with his mates in the death squad: when not working over enemies of the Revolution, they dance, sing, trade slaps, and bump skulls like boarding-school bros—in matching blood-red tracksuits, heads shaven to a gloss. (The polished male cranium holds a particular appeal for wife-and-husband director/writers Natasha Merkulova and Aleksey Chupov.) But these bad boys’ smooth, glowing heads will soon contort into agonized webs of veins when the bullets start flying the other way, for top management has ordered a purge of the purgers (corresponding historically to the moment Stalin decided his paramilitary had gotten out of control). When Volkonogov sees his old boss leap to his death from a window and his fellow enforcers serially disappear, he rightly reckons he’s next and slips out past the guards just as his name is called.

Volkonogov translates as “wolf-legged,” its letters scrambled from the more common surname Volkogonov—“wolf hunter”—and much of the film is Borisov putting his wolf legs to work, sprinting along streets, up staircases, and across rooftops, predator turned prey (“Peter and the Wolf” plays on a tinny radio in Volkonogov’s communal apartment). But fleeing the authorities is only the first escape in Captain Volkonogov Escaped, the physical escape. The man-on-the-run thriller turns metaphysical when Volkonogov’s best buddy from work, Veretennikov (Nikita Kukushkin), who’s been creatively tortured to death (a gas mask and a Russian folk song are involved), now rises from a mass grave with a message from the other world—a Jacob Marley of the secret police. “Do you know what eternal torments are, Captain?” Veretennikov asks, and noisily rips Volkonogov’s guts out, twisting them around his fist. He tells his friend that the only way to avoid hell is to repent and to receive forgiveness from a victim’s loved one. Then he sulks back into the man-pile of corpses and eternal damnation, leaving his pal (guts back in belly) as shell-shocked as Scrooge. Captain Wolf Legs must now get the addresses of his victims’ families, which means sneaking back into heavily guarded police headquarters. The race for redemption is on in this coupling of an archetypal ghost story—the ghost delivering a warning—with one of the darkest chapters in Soviet history. It’s not capitalist excess, as in Dickens, but communist zealotry that has led this protagonist into sin.

In the repeated refusals to forgive that follow, we meet some nicely drawn noir-esque characters. Captain Volkonogov tracks down the father of a young man he beat into confessing to “participation in a student terrorist organization.” The former father—he legally renounced his son for being a traitor and wishes he could have attended his execution—is a tricky customer. Veteran actor Yury Kuznetsov, who actually served in the KGB border guard, seems to cloud his face and stony blue eyes to portray a man taught by experience never to remove his mask. Then there is the executioner in a butcher’s apron, nicknamed “Cartridge” (because he only needs one), played by a Karloffian Igor Savochkin with a mix of fatherly care and indifference to human life. After shooting wrapped, Savochkin was diagnosed with liver cancer and only outlived the film’s premiere in Venice by two months—the pallor and gauntness are not merely makeup. And there is the executed accountant’s widow who’s lost her mind. When told her husband was beaten into confessing himself a spy, she takes off her clothes and speaks riddles to a frozen Volkonogov.