Agony: The Life and Death of Rasputin

“Monk. Heretic. Messiah. Madman.”

Grigori Rasputin (Aleksey Petrenko) wants a hold on the empire, and in St Petersburg he has found it through Nicholas II (Anatoliy Romashin), an emperor who leans on the mystic's strange practices and mesmerizing manner. The court nobles who see a liability in him begin to plan his death. Elem Klimov made the film in the 1970s, and what remains is Rasputin himself, in the final year of Imperial Russia, unhurried among the people who want him gone.