As icy as Park Chan-Wook’s Stoker was tempestuous, this Russian black comedy won’t thaw out; no matter how many corpses the titular boilerman – elderly war hero turned gangland stooge (Mikhail Skryabin) – feeds into his furnace.
Director Aleksey Balabanov makes strong use of Skryabin’s deadpan features and paints a portrait of modern Russia as an honourless wild East, with the spiralling violence measured against the stoker’s old-school stoicism.
Be warned, though: patience will be tested by the most intrusively jaunty score in history.
