This is the violence that is inherent in the system

I was familiar with Armando Iannucci's through watching the scabrous political satire of his "The Thick of It" show so was curious when I saw a first trailer for "The Death of Stalin".

"The Thick of It" was brutal in its depiction of a political game to be won at all costs. Stalin shares some of that and some of the best bits in the film are when the difference between nastiness and comedy is razor-thin. With the security forces of the NKVD out and either imprisoning or executing rivals to power, the threat of violence is always close at hand.

Into this is added the machinations of the various members of the politburo to identify or become the main player in the post-Stalin world, with Lavrentiy Beria (the head of the NKVD, played by Simon Russell Beale) and Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi) as the main competitors.

A decision was made to allow each of the actors to use his or her own speaking voice for the film, resulting in a melange of accents. The dialogue takes on a somewhat distracting quality and, for me, moved it in the direction of sketch comedy, rather than a coherently presented feature. While very funny in parts and occasionally chilling, I found the end result a little disappointing. I was looking for something with the teeth of "The Thick of It" and got something closer to the political satire of "Monty Python".