Brother

Brother (Брат, 1997) is Aleksei Balabanov's defining crime drama, available to watch online on iFILM. Danila Bagrov (Sergei Bodrov Jr.) comes back from the army, heads to St. Petersburg to find his older brother Viktor (Viktor Sukhorukov), and discovers Viktor is a contract killer currently hiding from the people who hired him.

Danila steps in. He navigates the city with a quiet ease that masks how quickly he can turn dangerous. Balabanov filmed in the actual St. Petersburg of the mid-1990s — street markets, communal flats, broken trams, the daily texture of a country where the rules had dissolved and money was the only law left standing.

Bodrov created a character that became a generational touchstone in Russia: not a hero in any clean sense, more a product of his time who happened to be effective at violence. The film spawned a sequel and became one of the most referenced works of Russian cinema from that decade. Stream Brother (1997) online on iFILM.