Goofs

The film spans 12 years, yet Lt. Viktor Burakov's children don't age.

Russian married people wear wedding ring on the right hand, not on the left one as it's shown in the movie.

On the day of Chikatilo's arrest, the trees bear green leaves, despite it being late November in Russia.

When Chikatilo is being berated in the factory, behind him is a red sign designating "Heros of Labor this month." This sign is misspelled. The first character on the bottom should be a Cyrillic "E" (which looks like a backwards 3) instead of a "Ye" (which looks like a Latin "E").

When KGB General Ivanov is first introduced to the committee, he actually wears a Soviet Air Force First lieutenant's shoulder strips.

Chikatilo's final victim was not an eight-year-old girl, but a twenty-two-year-old woman.

In the first on-camera killing, as the murderer moves away from the victim, the corpse takes a breath.

When the last murder victim is discovered in the woods at night during a rain storm. The three Russian soldiers standing in the foreground are carrying Hungarian AMD-65 rifles. At the time of Chikatilo's last murder in 1990, Soviet troops would have been armed with AK-74 rifles. This film was shot on location in Hungary.

Chickatilo is executed with a Glock 17 pistol which would not have been in use in the Soviet Union. If executed by pistol, his executioner would likely have used a Makarov or Tokarev.

Near the beginning of the film, Burakov, a forensic scientist, is peering through a microscope. The mirror for reflecting light is under his chest, blocking the light. The microscope is always used with the mirror away from the body, so light reflected from the mirror can illuminate the specimen from underneath.

At around the 41-minute mark, Chikatilo stabs a woman in the dead center of her sternum, yet after approximately 1 second blood begins to appear under her left breast.

When he lifts his knife before plunging it into her chest again, the original stab wound becomes visible; it barely bleeds, even though that wound would obviously have pierced her heart.

There is a gap between the small patch of blood over her sternum and the larger, growing patch of blood under her left breast, so this could not have been a case of blood flowing under her blouse from the original stab wound to the inexplicable larger patch of blood.

At the 12-13th minute, under the track number of the arriving domestic train, you can see the inscription "MÁV", which stands for "Magyar Államvasutak" (Hungarian State Railways).

All trains are Hungarian (where the footage was shot) not Russian.

Burakov has the microscope facing the wrong way while looking through it in the lab when arguing to Fetisov when he declares that "Bondarchuk is a stupid man."