Tolyan is a bad guy, but he's also alluring in his meanness, just like Joseph Stalin, whose face he has tattoo'd on his body. Pavel Chukrai's film is a political allegory of a sort, and there are also overt Hamlet allusions: the boy's ghostly father appears dreamlike and asks for his death to be avenged. So Tolyan is not only a Stalin stand-in but also Hamlet's fratricidal and usurping uncle Claudius. That's too much symbolism for what is essentially a modest, well-told melodrama. The Thief's chief attraction (and probably the reason it got American distribution) is Philipchuk's winning, blue-eyed little boy.