Given Kuklinsky’s long and murderous career, clearly Vromen made deliberate choices on what aspects of his subject’s world he wanted to portray. Giving Liotta’s Demeo albeit brief moments of humanity and affection, and Shannon’s Kuklinsky some domestic bliss in a morally deranged world confuses stereotypes typical of the genre. This is a film primarily about people with dysfunctional relationships, particularly with themselves, with their families and so-called friends and with deadly consequence, all clothed in a ‘mob’ crime drama. Further clues of this are most apparent in Vromen’s election to portray these more human moments and the murders themselves in an existentialist world void of any belief in God or fateful intervention.

Kuklinsky is in complete control of his actions; even in his few moments of overt rage he takes responsibility. In one poignant scene he exhorts Marty to “pray to God” for his life, to see “if anything happens”. He repeats advice given to his daughter to describe the state of things: “God doesn’t have time for everybody”. There is a hint of pleasure or perhaps satisfaction from Kuklinsky in his demonstration of amoral, delusional superiority, acting without conscience and with rationalism that even Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment would not sustain.  Michael Shannon’s performance as Kuklinsky brings a zeal for this rational world devoid of any God, matching the dogmatic zeal and intensity he brings to his bible thumping fundamentalist Agent Van Alden in Boardwalk Empire, and with the same result: anyone outside his controlled material world, in this case his wife and daughters, is expendable without remorse.

Audiences will be left chilled by this film, especially for its honesty in taking on Richard Kuklinsky’s terrifying life without resolution. Michael Shannon should be a shoe-in for a Best Actor nod at Oscar time.

-Alfredo Romano