Eastern European-former Soviet Bloc films project a gritty ugliness that, for all the explicit mayhem and bright corn-syrup gore -- actually, because of it -- the West rarely images. Russian Federation director/writer Alexey Balabanov indicates that his eleventh feature, Cargo 200/Gruz 200, “shows what filth we live in, a society sick from 1917 onwards.” Based at some remove on a homegrown serial killer, the tale widens to implicate officialdom and a culture of vodka-fueled stupefaction that has lowered life expectancy.

The film setting is 1984, in and around provincial industrial Leniski nearing the end of the Soviet experiment. It is a male-dominant world where peasants drink to debate and then pass out cold, university department heads until they stagger, and students and young proto-capitalists gather at seedy clubs to listen to awful domestic rock and also drink to unconsciousness.

One of few who do not indulge in this national Slavic sottishness is a blank laconic Putin-figure in a blue shirt (Alexey Poluyan), slight with a little pot, who does not come into his macabre own until later on. He wordlessly indicates a squalid farmhouse when Leningrad University Professor of Scientific Atheism Artyom (Leonid Gromov) needs help with his stalled car. Inside, Alexey (Alexey Serebryakov) tells Vietnamese Sunka (Mikhail Skryabin) to attend to the auto, while ordering stoic wife Tonya (Natalya Akimova) to serve soup and more alcohol to accompany his utopian Orthodox Sun City defense against the academic’s Godless Communism.

The professor and his army coronel brother Mikhail (Yuri Stepanov) had earlier discussed the former’s impending visit to their mother, the ills of the decaying state, and the arrival of twenty-six more military coffins aboard the frequent Cargo 200 flights from Afghanistan. The coronel’s daughter Liza keeps company with Valery (Leonid Bichevin), who earns three times the coronel’s salary and that evening is dancing and drinking with Angelica (Agniya Kuznetsova), the daughter’s friend and the fiancée of Afghanistan-deployed Kolya.

SPOILER ALERT

Seeking better booze, Valery drives “Lika” to Alexey’s, guzzles more, and falls dead drunk, at which Tonya hides the frightened young woman. Blue-shirt hunts her down, kills the protesting car mechanic, and deflowers the victim. Come dawn he handcuffs the bleeding girl to a motorcycle sidecar and then to a bed in the apartment of his mother, an alcohol-sodden television addict who believes, or doesn’t care, that the captive is a daughter-in-law who does not return her son’s love.

Now revealed as sadistic police captain Zhurov, the man has an unexplained prison relationship with Alexey, who is taken into custody for shotgunning the Vietnamese. While Zhurov heaps depravity after physical and mental depravity upon the young woman, he gazes from his mother’s on the same grimy elevated freight tracks that the professor sees from his mother’s place. Laced by the arrivals of flights of military dead and wounded, by Lika’s Party-official father’s anguish about his missing daughter and by a search for an appropriate gravesite for a fallen hero with no family, these characters are pulled together.

That Tonya will be the avenger who cuts the skein, is dispassionate irony. Indeed, Alexandr Simonov’s muted color camera could not be more detached. Comment there is, albeit pessimistic, in Valery’s hooking up with Coronel Mikhail’s wastrel son Slava on a money scheme, but the picture speaks for itself. Poor, nasty, brutish, and short are the Soviet lives here, uncomfortable to watch but as compelling as Richard Widmark’s giggling début in Kiss of Death or Tarantino’s more graphic one with Reservoir Dogs.

(Released by Disinformation Company Ltd. Not rated by MPAA.)