Dead Man's Bluff

Dead Man's Bluff or Zhmurki is a 2005 Russian black comedy/crime film. Director Aleksei Balabanov, who directed Brother and Brother 2, uses cameo performances, by Russia's most prominent actors. The film depicts the anarchistic reality of the free-market streets of Russia in the beginning of 1990s, where the only real liberty was the freedom to kill. Plot The film opens in 2005 with a professor lecturing a group of university students on the primitive accumulation of capital. By way of example, she mentions how capital was accumulated during the 1990s. The film flashes to Nizhny Novgorod in 1995, to an interrogation scene between a torturer, nicknamed "the Executioner", and a gagged prisoner in a morgue. Before the torturer can start the interrogation, three masked men barge in with pistols. A gunfight ensues and one of the masked men is killed as well as the prisoner and the torturer has been shot in the stomach. The leader of the masked men takes off his disguise and it is revealed that he is a police officer (nicknamed "the Cop"). Stepan shoots the man in the head and then shoots his own partner. Stepan takes a piece of paper from the torturer's pocket and seems excited by what he reads on it.