The Factory

In broad daylight, an oligarch is yanked out of his Mercedes — that's how The Factory (Zavod, 2018) opens, Yuri Bykov's crime thriller you can watch online on iFILM. What follows is one long night inside a workshop where two sides collide.

The kidnappers demand a ransom, and the businessman's head of security, nicknamed Tuman, drives his men and the cash to a derelict plant. There his armed crew runs into people they never expected: the factory's own workers, led by a former special-forces soldier called Sedoy. Six months without wages and looming bankruptcy pushed them to barricade the shop and settle the score with their boss. The guards have guns and orders. The workers have nothing left to lose. Denis Shvedov, Andrei Smolyakov and Vladislav Abashin hold the standoff almost in real time.

Bykov returns to his usual subject — the small man against the machine — and presses it into a single factory until it turns into a powder keg. No gloss here: grimy concrete, raw voices, gunfire instead of speeches. Hard, bleak cinema with no happy ending, the kind that leaves you quiet. Stream The Factory (2018) online on iFILM.