You need a strong stomach to swallow the gore-soaked violence of Kirill Sokolov’s exercise in mayhem, but the picture’s cartoonish quality makes it go down more easily. Though not to everyone’s taste, fans of black, bleak bloodletting will find it exhilaratingly wild, if totally tasteless and amoral. The movie begins with Matvei (Aleksandr Kuznetsov), a nervous young fellow wearing a hoodie emblazoned with a Batman logo, arriving at an apartment with a hammer. He intends to use it to kill Andrei (Vitaliy Khaev), the father of his girlfriend Olya (Evgeniya Kregzhde), an aspiring actress who—we learn—has told him that her dad raped her as a child. Matvei is foiled when a neighbor arrives in the hallway with a snarling dog, and Olya’s mother Tasha (Elena Shevchenko)—who was expected to be away at the family’s country house—is there. Even worse, Andrei, a burly, seasoned cop, suspects that Matvei is not Olya’s boyfriend but a criminal sent to assassinate him, and pulls a gun. Matvei would be dead meat—and the movie over—if the young man did not possess an exceptional heart, which resumes beating after stopping for ten minutes. His resuscitation restarts the cat-and-mouse game between him and Andrei that runs through the picture. A few other characters enter the story, which apart from a few flashbacks is almost entirely confined to the apartment and the hallway outside it. One is Olya, whom Andrei summons to interrogate. Another is Andrei’s partner Yevgenich (Mikhail Gorevoy), a sad-sack fellow with whom he had conspired to fleece a couple in order to spring their son (Aleksandr Domogarov), a drug-addled brute who had literally decapitated a woman, from jail. Andrei seeks Yevgenich’s help in disposing of Matvei, but the revelation of his previous betrayal of the poor man throws a monkey wrench into that hope. A pair of cops arrive to answer a noise complaint but sheepishly retire after learning that the place belongs to Andrei. Constructed like a Rube Goldberg contrivance, this is a gross-out farce in which Matvei is hardly the only character who repeatedly comes back to life so that the riot of nastiness can continue; the result resembles a live-action Looney Tunes suffused with splatters and wounds you never saw Yosemite Sam or Wile E. Coyote suffer in their encounters with Bugs Bunny or the Road Runner. Whether you find that hilariously over-the-top or revolting will be a matter of taste. In any event, one must admit that the picture is expertly engineered, with craft contributions that help make it a madcap adult comic brought to life. So while Sokolov’s movie is nothing more than a smirking, sardonically grisly game, on that admittedly low level, it works. Extras include the theatrical trailer, a series of short behind-the-scene films (27 min. total), and four short films by Sokolov (91 min. total). A strong optional purchase for genre fans. (F. Swietek)