“Hukkunud Alpinisti” hotell / Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel / Hotel „Zum verunglückten Alpinisten“

An anonymous call summons police inspector Peter Glebsky to the Dead Mountaineer’s hotel. At first glance, the emergency call appears to have been a false alarm. Only after Glebsky has spent a night in the hotel and an avalanche prevents him from leaving do events overtake him. One hotel guest is murdered, another tied up, and a third found frozen to death. His investigation leads the inspector well beyond the threshold of the rational... Set in a nostalgic art deco hotel amid a group of oddball guests, the film conjures up a quaint $Magic Mountain% atmosphere. But the detective story slowly devolves into a surrealistic farce, as the film noir segues into science fiction. Shot in the Kazakh ski resort Shymbulak and based on a novel by Russians Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, who also wrote the screenplay, the film is a psychedelic classic of the fantasy film genre. Like Andrei Tarkovsky’s film of the Strugatskys’ $Stalker%, this Estonian production bursts all the conventional orthodoxies of Soviet cinematography.