The Death of Stalin

Armando Iannucci’s film is adapted from La Mort de Staline, the French graphic novel by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin. The leads do not attempt Russian accents: Iannucci has said it would kill the comedy dead; he wanted the audience to feel present. Jason Isaacs plays Zhukov in broad Yorkshire, Buscemi keeps his own Brooklyn voice. Christopher Willis wrote the score deliberately in Shostakovich’s idiom. Exteriors were shot in Kyiv and at Moscow’s Red Gate Building. It never reached Russian cinemas: on 23 January 2018, two days before it was due to open, State Duma MPs attended a screening, and two days later the Ministry of Culture withdrew the distribution certificate. Historian Richard Overy finds it littered with errors: Beria was arrested three months after Stalin died, not almost at the same moment. Iannucci answers that it is not a documentary but a fiction built from what the time felt like. At the 2017 British Independent Film Awards it turned 13 nominations into four wins: Supporting Actor (Simon Russell Beale), Production Design, Make Up and Hair Design, Casting. It also took Best Comedy at the 31st European Film Awards. A good fit if a Politburo in English regional accents reads as a choice, not a lapse. Not for anyone who objects to a period with real victims staged as comedy.