Malcolm McDowell has been one of my favorite actors ever since I finally saw A Clockwork Orange. It took a few years between staring at the soundtrack album cover to actually getting to watch the movie. It’s not like the Stanley Kurbick ultra-violence masterpiece was part of the afternoon Million Dollar Movie rotation on my local UHF channels. I had to wait until they created video rental stores. I quickly found his other films on the shelves including If.., Cat People, Time After Time and even Caligula. Recently he came to a horror convention in my city, but it was the same time I took my kid to a different convention on the other side of town. Instead of getting to meet Malcolm, I found myself being called “weird” by William Shatner in front of hundreds of Trekkies. I now cheer when Malcolm McDowell kills Shatner in Star Trek: Generations. While I’d seen many of McDowell’s movies, I had no clue he made a film called The Assassin of the Tsar in the Soviet Union at the start of the ’90s. I would have seen it at Raleigh’s Rialto if it had made it on the art house circuit. The film is finally made it to my neighborhood thanks to Deaf Crocodile releasing the bizarre and captivating tale on Blu-ray.
Timofeyev (Malcolm McDowell) is a patient at a Soviet insane asylum. Among the many reasons he’s been locked away is his belief that he is the assassin who killed Tsar Alexander II and later took out Tsar Nicholas II (the last reigning Tsar – sometimes spelled Czar). Dr. Smirnov (Mute Witness‘ Oleg Yankovsky) and his supervisor Alexander Yegorovich (Gikor‘s Armen Dzhigarkhanyan) are figuring if they need to transfer him to a different facility. They know he can’t be the assassin because the killings took place in 1881 and 1918. They are examining him in late ’80s Soviet Union. Timofeyev doesn’t look to be over a 100. Things get weird when one morning Dr. Smirnov notices a wound around his patient’s neck. It almost looks like he was hung. The doctor wonders if it was self-inflected. An orderly points out that this same thing happened a year ago to Timofeyev. The day is the anniversary of Tsar Alexander II’s assassin being hung. Yegorovich views the patient as schizophrenic. Dr. Smirnov wants to try an experiment where he tells the wannabe assassin that he was Tsar Nicholas II. Instead of causing a change in Timofeyev; things happen to the doctor including a mysterious wound one night. He begins to want to know about how “he” died. Timofeyev is more than willing to give a detailed account of the demise of the last royal family of Russia from his perspective as the killer. Can the doctor doubt that Timofeyev is a man who travels in time?
The timing of film could not have been better. The Assassin of the Tsar is about the final days of the Russian empire being produced in what was the final days of the Soviet Union. The Baltic State declared independence from Moscow around this time. The story of what happened to Tsar Nicholas II was pretty much banned by the communists until Gorbachev introduced Perestroika.
This movie seems to work off two of McDowell’s biggest role. Timofeyev is as cold blooded as Alex in A Clockwork Orange. Although his violence is directed mainly as Russian monarchs. The time traveling element puts him in the shifting spaces of H.G. Wells in Time After Time except he’s not chasing Jack the Ripper. His Jack the Ripper. Oddly enough the film features McDowell playing the character twice. Turns out he did each scene in English and Russian. Although his lines were dubbed in Russian. There’s a lot of voiceovers so you’re not glued to his lips.
This was the follow up to director Karen Shakhnazarov’s brilliantly bizarre Zerograd. What’s impressive is that he proves his ability to create offbeat movies is so diverse. The Assassin of the Tsar is equally strange, but in a different way from Zerograd. Who is the real person losing their grip on sanity when the doctor and patient talk. Is there a chance the doctor was once the Tsar of Russia? There is a comic moment when one of the shrinks questions why a patient wouldn’t want to be Caligula. That was also a role McDowell played. Shakhnazarov creates an amazing atmosphere on the screen where you can believe as assassin can defy time.
While it stinks that I didn’t meet Malcolm McDowell last summer; I’d now be frustrated that didn’t know about The Assassin of the Tsar back then so I couldn’t ask him about the film. Next time McDowell comes around, I’ll be skipping Shatner and talking about the Tsar.
The Video is 1.37:1 full frame. The transfer is taken from a 2K restoration. Things look sharp between the time travels inside Russia. The Audio is DTS-HD MA 2.0 stereo. Things sound sharp during the assassinations. The movie is subtitled in English.
Russian language version of film (102:33) features a different edit and score. There’s a bit of change of tone with the different musical accompaniment. Shakhnazarov shot the film with McDowell and the main cast speaking English and Russian so the edits mainly vary by that footage.
Interview with star Malcolm McDowell (54:35) is conducted by Dennis Bartok of Deaf Crocodile on a video call. You can tell how much the film means to McDowell since he’s willing to talk about it for so long. He gets into the oddity of being the only English actor to star in a major Russian production made in Russia and his character is Russian. He reflects on how things were changing around him as they made the movie in Moscow.
Interview with director Karen Shakhnazarov (68:16) has Bartok conduct the interview. The director is now in charge of Mosfilm. Shakhnazarov points out that The Assassin of the Tsar was the last film released in the Soviet Union because shortly after it arrived in theaters, USSR collapsed and only Russia remained. He talks about how he was supposed to do another movie for an Italian production company. But that fell apart and left him with a different idea for a movie taking place at a mental hospital. What’s great is when Shakhnazarov and his interpreter argue about what word he should be saying in English.
Audio commentary by film writer and historian Samm Deighan has her see it as “late Soviet cinema.” The movie did get international attention because of Malcolm McDowell. It was the English version that was sent around the globe. She compares the movie to Zerograd in the way both films talk about forbidden Soviet history. We get background on the Soviet/Russian actors in the movie. There is also historical context for the assassination of the Tsar and his family and how the Communist hid the truth from the people.
Illustrated booklet contains a new essay by film critic and historian Walter Chaw
Deaf Crocodile presents The Assassin of the Tsars (Tsareubiytsa). Directed by Karen Shakhnazarov. Screenplay by Aleksandr Borodyanskiy & Karen Shakhnazarov. Starring Malcolm McDowell, Oleg Yankovskiy, Armen Dzhigarkhanyan, Yuriy Sherstnyov, Anzhela Ptashuk, Viktor Seferov, Olga Antonova, Dariya Majorova, Evgeniya Kryukova & Alyona Teremizova. Running Time: 105 minutes. Rating: Unrated. Release Date: October 14, 2025.
