“Identification”: the detective is not according to the canons

by time news

The girl Valeria (Lena Tronina, known from the series Happy End, Dyatlov Pass) works as a saleswoman at the clothing market and tells everyone that she is an orphan. The owner of the outlet Bakir (Kuralbek Chokoev) looks at her as his property, and his younger brother Aman (Anvar Osmonaliev) is in love and calls for marriage. On the day of the wedding, after watching the bride in the toilet, Bakir tries to rape her, Valeria resists, and a few minutes later Bakir is found killed. The morphine investigator Plakhov (Oleg Vasilkov, known for the film Brother-2, the series Palmist and Whirlpool) who was about to retire, after thinking carefully about this matter, decides that everything is not so simple here and retirement, along with a quiet death from an overdose while they wait.

Before us is a plot in the spirit of a classic detective story. A murder has been committed, everything points to the heroine, and the viewer has no rational reason to doubt her guilt. But, of course, he doubts, because according to the laws of the genre, appearances must be deceptive. Doubts gnaw at both Plakhov, who is deadly tired of life and his drug addiction, and the young lawyer with cerebral palsy Daniil Kramer (Roman Vasilyev, known from the TV series “Better Than People”), whom everyone treats condescendingly as a weak freak, but who is by no means stupid and, no doubt, will show itself again.

The plot is not limited to the investigation of the murder case – taking it as a starting point, the authors immediately give their detective story a wider scale. Already at the very beginning, among the frozen meat in the carcass, the corpses of three girls with the same tattoos appear. Sometimes a shaven-headed boy performed by Nikita Kukushkin (known as an actor of the Gogol Center and for his work in the TV series Call Center, Method and the film Captain Volkogonov Fled) and another muddy type with incomprehensible plot functions for the time being. Director and screenwriter Vladlena Sandu (a student of director Alexei Uchitel) scatters fragments of the mosaic around the plot, which in the future, if everything goes right with the script, should form into a coherent picture.

But the main mystery here is the heroine herself: the same tattoo as those of the murdered girls, fake passports in the safe deposit box, and not an orphan at all, as the police quickly find out. Gradually, it is her secret that comes to the fore, as the name of the series says: “Identification” is, of course, about the identification of the heroine, and not anyone or anything else.

In the retelling, all this may look like the usual criminal bullshit, however, showing a clothing market, a police station and an attempted rape in a toilet, the director deviates far from plain social television realism. On the whole, “Identification” is fundamentally alien to simplicity, carefully polished cinema with an application for sophistication and an irresistible weakness for spectacular techniques. Sandu prefers interior photography, and among interiors, he prefers claustrophobic spaces, where it is so convenient to create a mysterious atmosphere.

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