Evilenko is a fictional film based on the real life Soviet serial killer Andrei Cikatilo (sometimes spelled Chikatilo), a human monster who terrorized (mostly) the port city of Rostov from 1978 until his incarceration in 1990. [1] Cikatilo has the dubious distinction of being the most prolific (if that is the right word) serial killer in modern history, with anywhere from 52 to 55 victims, according to different accounts. More disturbing is the method of his killing, which included rapacious, wolf-like attacks of live dismemberment, multiple stabbings, and cannibalism. Reading descriptions of his killings makes one sick to the stomach, and is a disturbing reminder of the depraved depths to which a sick mind can sink. The film stars Malcolm McDowell as the killer (here renamed Andrei Evilenko, not the most subtle of names), Marton Csokas as Vadim Timurovic Lesiev, the head magistrate placed in charge of tracking down the killer, and Ronald Pickup as Dr. Aron Richter, the psychoanalyst enlisted to help track down Evilenko. The director is David Grieco, a former journalist turned filmmaker who wrote a fictionalized account of his journalistic reports on Cikatilo entitled The Communist Who Ate Children, before turning to this, his first feature film.

　　Evilenko is, along with Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, one of the more grim cinematic depictions of a murderous mind. Everything from the brooding score by David Lynch regular Angelo Bandalamenti, the somber, grey-brown lighting palette, the rigid, ‘lifeless’ camera movements (cinematographer Fabio Zamarion), to the depressed looking locations renders an unrelenting sense of destitution and oppression. Although the film does not shirk from the gravity of the crimes, the heinous murders are never overtly graphic or gratuitous. In fact the film goes one step further by underscoring how traumatic the sight of a murder can be to even a trained person. In most serial killer films the gruesome sight of a murder