Chikatilo (Seasons 1–3)

Chikatilo (2021) is a Russian crime series you can watch online on iFILM. Directed by Sarik Andreasyan and David Dadunashvili, it follows the hunt for the Soviet Union's most notorious killer. For years the investigation chased the wrong men while bodies kept turning up in the woods around Rostov, and a stooped, bespectacled man in glasses went home each evening to his wife and children.

Fyodor Lavrov plays Andrei Chikatilo as a forgettable office clerk — the kind of face you'd never pick out of a crowd. That ordinariness is the horror of him. A second thread tracks the people who spent a decade trying to identify him: prosecutors, detectives and psychiatrists forced to invent techniques the USSR had never needed. The cast also includes Dmitry Nagiev, Konstantin Lavronenko and Vitaliy Kishchenko.

The show deliberately leans on the suffocating grind of the search rather than gore — and on the cost of getting it wrong, when an innocent man nearly died for crimes he didn't commit. Heavy, slow-burning viewing for anyone drawn to genuine true crime over tidy detective fare. The squeamish should skip it. Stream every episode of Chikatilo (2021) online on iFILM.