In a few weeks, you lucky bastards will be receiving The Death of Stalin. You will see it. It’s so good, I took only a minimal amount of notes, realizing almost immediately that I would be seeing it again, probably in the theater. The only line of dialog that I will give away serves as the title to this piece. Which, to be fair, could open any piece of writing I make here. About my trust in you, by the way.

Its homolog punchline is what you will be receive as your reward for seeing the film.

The Death of Stalin is, not unlike Conspiracy, a film about evil. It contains what may be the most reprehensible and heartstoppingly terrifying character (Mr. Simon Russell Beale) in a long, long time. It further depicts what makes evil possible in everybody else: laziness, incompetence, fear and corruption. The normal.

I got some freebee tickets to the Dinard Festival. You have to love that it says «exonérée».

To see the subject and know instantly that it deserved a comedy takes a bravery and an intelligence that could only be honed from Mr. Armando Iannucci’s years of experience.

Fine. He saw an awesome French comic book, but he knew to buy the rights.

This insight (and shopping expertise) pales to the skill with which he delivers tone jumps that most great filmmakers never achieve across their entire œuvre, let alone within a single film. As characters are rounded up to be murdered or tortured, escaping or missing escape by comic or tragic turns, your intake of cold breath reminds you how much the shock of fear is like the shock of the funny.

You might think its comic take on history would liken it to The Day the Clown Cried or the featureless, unfunny and justly forgotten Life is Beautiful. But its closest companion is probably Goodfellas, a film that knew that we could only survive this level of sociopathy by laughing out loud, right after we were sick to our stomachs.

Historical horror slapstick biopic of manners? They don’t have a word for what this film is. It is new. I fucking dare you.