Dead Man's Bluff

Dead Man's Bluff (Zhmurki, 2005) is Aleksei Balabanov's pitch-black crime comedy, and you can watch online on iFILM. The setting is mid-1990s provincial Russia, where most arguments tend to end with a bullet to the head.

Two thugs, Sergei and Simon (Aleksei Panin and Dmitri Dyuzhev), have to hand a suitcase of heroin to a local crime boss called Mikhalych, or die trying. The deal falls apart, the case vanishes, and a long line of gangsters, cops and opportunists forms behind it. Nikita Mikhalkov plays the boss as a smug man in a raspberry blazer, handing out errands like death sentences. The supporting bench is stacked: Sergei Makovetsky, Viktor Sukhorukov, Andrei Krasko, Aleksei Serebryakov.

Balabanov isn't being nostalgic here. This is a vicious cartoon of a decade when a human life was worth less than the bag everyone is chasing. The violence is deliberately slapstick, the dialogue turned into street slang, and the ending flips the whole bloody farce into a different key. If you know him only from Brother, this is a louder, nastier, grinning Balabanov. Stream Dead Man's Bluff (2005) online on iFILM.