When you think of the Stalinist Soviet Union, all the tyranny, democide, corruption, and the political backstabbing, naturally your first thought is how truly horrifying it must've been to live underneath, right? Well not if your name is director/co-writer Armando Iannucci. No, apparently he heard about all these nightmarish totalitarian stories and he saw the potential for an absurdist political satire and dark comedy.

But I guess it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. I mean, what happens when a man who was as powerful and tyrannical as Josef Stalin dies and you put a lot of his closest men together, each of them pining for this very powerful position? I'll tell you what happens; you get one heck of a hilarious comedy, with all the power dynamics of "Game of Thrones," but filled with a cast of characters that have the temperaments of people that wouldn't be out of place in "The Office." There is just something so hilarious about the juxtaposition of portraying these murderous psychopaths vying for power as manchildren with weak skin.

While this film certainly doesn't shy away from how truly awful living in Stalinist Russia would be, this film also doesn't shy away from pointing out the delightful absurdities of living in such a society. Murder and cold-blooded torture are treated as simply normal everyday occurrences, like the sounds of a copier making copies in an office. People accepting how crappy their society is, but being forced to treat it like it's all sunshine and rainbows. Stalin literally collapsing behind closed doors, but nobody going in to check on him, out of fear of being executed for interrupting him.

This is seriously, one of the most hilarious comedies I've ever seen. This film plays out almost like a typical episode of "Veep" or "The Office," except with people that have the power to kill hundreds with impunity, which results in some of the best examples of pitch-black dark comedy ever committed to film. This film is both hysterical and terrifying, sometimes simultaneously.

I do not know a lot about USSR history; it's just not my forte. As such, in order to see how historically accurate this film is, I did some cursory research (which means I Googled it and did a scan). Far as I can tell, this film is mostly fictionalized; taking the bare bones of what happened and then telling its own narrative however it sees fit. So do not go into this expecting a historically accurate version of what happened, because you absolutely will not get it. If your willing to overlook that, however, you will witness, in my opinion, one the greatest and funniest comedies ever made.