# Chikatilo (2021)

> A Soviet-era police team hunts a serial killer whose murders went unconnected for over a decade while an innocent man pays for them.

Canonical page: https://ember.film/tv/91301

## Facts

- Seasons: 3
- Episodes: 24
- Episode runtime: 50 min
- Status: Ended
- Genres: crime, drama
- Created by: Sarik Andreasyan
- Network: Okko
- Cast: Fyodor Lavrov, Nikolay Kozak, Oleg Kamenshchikov, Dmitry Vlaskin, Yuliya Afanasyeva, Dmitriy Nagiev, Viktoriya Bogatyryova, Evgeny Shirikov
- TMDB rating: 6.8/10
- IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14298980/

## Ember's analysis

- Pacing: measured
- Intensity: strong
- Complexity: layered
- Violence: brutal
- Tone: bleak, grim, tense, paranoid, sober

## What critics say

Audiences rate the Russian true-crime drama as mixed, with its dramatized hunt for the serial killer Chikatilo praised for its gripping investigation and held back by uneven execution.

## Synopsis

Chikatilo (2021-2024) is a Russian true crime drama series created by Sarik Andreasyan for Okko, a three-season run of eight-episode seasons totaling twenty-four episodes. Dmitriy Nagiev plays the title killer, whose murders across more than a decade in the Soviet Union went unlinked, while Nikolay Kozak plays investigator Kovalev, who leads the hunt alongside Oleg Kamenshchikov as Lipyagin and Dmitry Vlaskin as Vitvicky. Yuliya Afanasyeva plays Irina Ovsyannikova in a storyline that follows the slow, painstaking effort to tie scattered bodies into one case. The engine of the show is institutional frustration: police officers, prosecutors and psychiatrists must invent new investigative methods in a system that refuses to believe such a predator exists, and every episode trades in grim forensic detail, interrogations and the mounting cost to those who are wrongly blamed. Set in the late Soviet era, the series is unflinching and bleak, with a heavy, paranoid atmosphere and a sober tone that rarely lets up. Its procedural structure follows the investigation across seasons, and its restrained realism places it in the company of Chernobyl and Mindhunter for viewers drawn to real-events crime stories built on patient investigation.

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