No Tears in Hell
The prospects are grim in Crow Creek, Alaska, a tired post-industrial town entering another cruel winter with a growing population of homeless on the streets, many of them young people who are wary of the man who trades goods in their encampment, Alex providing essentials at inflated prices but sometimes suggesting payment be in the form of favours, help on a clandestine job or perhaps something more personal when it is offered.
A cold man in a cold town, he lives in apartment 357 of a semi-deserted concrete block where his mother occasionally visits, aware of who her son is and what he does, the police disinterested in those from the encampment who never returned, their belongings abandoned, transient people whose surnames those huddled in the next tent never knew, anonymous people it is impossible to track or effectively prove are being targeted by a serial killer.
Transposed to America and shot in both Alaska and the seemingly incongruous state of Alabama, No Tears in Hell is based on the Russian serial killer Alexander Spesivtsev, known as “the Novokuznetsk Monster” and “the Siberian Ripper,” though his crimes were committed closer to the southern border of that vast region than the icy north, only charged along with his mother Lyudmila for four murders after his arrest in October 1996 though with the unproven likelihood that he was responsible for dozens more.
Directed by Michael Caissie, the film stars Luke Baines as Alex and Gwen Van Dam as his accomplice mother, their younger selves played by John McDonald and Kathy Butler Sandvoss as she brings home crime scene photos from her work for him to peruse, enabling his interests which, presumably exacerbated by being bullied by his father and peers, leads first to kidnapping and killing then cannibalism, bodies dismembered in the bathtub and limbs boiled down before bones are tossed off a bridge to float downstream.
The context of the killings changed from the turmoil of the collapse of the Soviet Union to an indeterminate time of American economic depression, Alex’s reasoning, such as it is, is conveyed in voiceover soundbites spanning Biblical quotes to Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Ramirez and Prince Philip, faux profundity familiar from those who position themselves online as alpha males and truth seeking survivalists, but despite the recurring image of the wolf he is no cunning hunter.
The script by Cassie and Alexander Nistratov emphasising the cruelty and suffering of the victims, men killed summarily while women are kept, at least for a while, Alex is a reptile who lures the desperate with false promises, an emotional void who blames the failure of the system yet targets those on the lowest level rather than those who might actually be responsible, his justifications for his acts facile and his techniques sloppy, No Tears in Hell at least accurate in its depiction of the low-key circumstances of Spesivtsev’s downfall, the film clinical rather than horrifying yet lacking the intellectual insight which a documentary which might have offered in its exploration of the same events.
No Tears in Hell will be streaming from Tuesday 12th August
