It’s a real shame that the films of Russia’s Alexei Balabanov rarely receive distribution in the UK – but thankfully that's been remedied with the limited release of 'The Stoker', his third grimy gem in a row after 2008’s ‘Cargo 200’ and 2009’s ‘Morphia’. Here, we’re given a contemporary gangster yarn whose bleak and brutal mechanics are given an ironic tinge with the aid of a bizarre and omnipresent techno/calypso/Latin score.
The stoker of the title is an elderly Yakut, once a major in the Soviet army, whose furnace is used to dispose of corpses by local gangsters. Beneath lashings of hardcore sex and violence, the film offers a sad lament for the lot of the disenfranchised and elderly, but it also says that sometimes all it takes to improve that lot is an assiduously thrust ski pole to the chest.