A psychedelic moog, isolated snowcapped getaway, labyrinthian hotel, a gruff police officer, and eccentric guests are perfectly suited for Covid madness.

Those Strugatsky dudes know something about melancholic atmospheres, effectively moody for adaptions (Stalker, Hard to be a God) or is that communist oppression? A feeling of isolation and serene abandonment; the hotel with flickering lights, winding hallways, dark shadows, and hidden mirrors accentuating a loss of time and cognitive dissonance -- accepting the paranormal while actively fighting against it.

Subtle surrealism, so some may be disappointed with its lack of absurdity, holds a grasp on reality with a tinge of dreamlike qualities. Story may be thin, combing sci-fi with locked room mystery, but I love the allegory on deontological…

Stop this goddamn hypnosis.

*Collab Catch-Up Project* #21/66

Escaping one atmospheric, partially alien-centric film to the next, my backtracking of Collab watches brings me to Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel; an Estonian-based project showcasing a political mystery yarn tied to overarching themes of science fiction. The filming location of Kazakhstan only ever looked better in Borat (I jest), but here, the looming, curvaceous, snowy mountain-scape encompasses our little whodunnit supported by ethereal synth-pop ear porn that had really yet to become a trend.

Our main man, Inspector Peter Grebsky, hails a mysterious call for help to this secluded hotel pondering all the while his own personal rationalistic thought processes and observations akin to the old-school film noir. Once brought to the hotel we…

Well, they certainly dance like aliens.

In a beautiful blue sky/snowy mountains opening sequence that’s positively honeyed over with ominous, misty sci-fi synth music (all feeling a bit like it might have inspired the opening of The Shining) a policeman - at first playful and charismatic, but ultimately the very portrait of course inflexible authority - drives high into a rocky range to an isolated hotel where he is presented, by and by, with a cross-genre perversion of a “locked-room” murder mystery.

Outside the hotel it’s bright sunlight, clear firmament and almost other-worldly snow-blanketed cordillera, but inside the hotel is a dim world, styled into a neon noir Nagel-esque dream. The kind of world where a good old fashion fascist…

I suppose it’s inevitable that as a white American man there will come a time when I’ll sit in airports reading Michael Connelly novels, but at this stage in my life, whodunits hold about as much appeal for me as playing shuffleboard or drinking a glass of warm milk before bed. Of course, there are a few exceptions (Columbo, Knives Out... umm... Hamlet?), but by and large, I generally can’t be bothered with the tedious procedural nature that tends to bog these things down. And it’s not that I don’t have the patience, it’s just that I can’t muster the energy to invest all my focus in a mystery that we all know (after a series of plugged-in clues and…

Dead Mountaineer's Hotel is a psychadelic voyage into mystery and madness. A powerful experience layered with tension, a hypnotic score and surreal imagery. Uniquely captivating it slowly creeps up on you and chills you to the bone.

A police officer is called to an isolated hotel in the middle of the snowy alps. Besides a few eccentric guests everything seems fine. But once an avalanche cuts them off from the outside world strange things begin to happen. Murder, paranoia and the slow descent into a reality of uncertainty. A dense eerie dissonance floods the mind and nothing is what it seems.

Can't say I've seen anything quite like this and I loved every little detail. The beautiful hotel setting and…

In 1979, an adaptation of one of the many influential novels from highly-regarded authors/brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky was released, with its screenplay penned and credited to them. Those who have been able to watch it have embraced it as instantaneously memorable and a work worth championing in the realm of hard sci-fi, downplaying its phenomenal subject by letting other components like great directing and atmosphere shine. I of course am referring to Stalker by the late, great Tarkovsky, though the other 1979 Strugatsky-based film Dead Mountaineer's Hotel ain't too shabby either, and acts as an intriguing twist on the typical noir detective storyline, infused with hints of strange atmosphere and critiques on blind logistics and defining the law of…

An Estonian murder-mystery so dizzying, it's as if Bava and Fassbinder concocted this in a lab while inhaling some heavy fumes.
Mates, you gotta open a bloody window!

A police inspector receives a strange call to investigate a snowy mountainside hotel. When he arrives everything seems to be in order, so he decides to stay the night and relax. However, an avalanche snows them in, encasing their small world in claustrophobic dread.
A jagged unravelling of dead bodies, unsavoury characters, and hostile illusions spins the Inspector around in this Giallo-esque plot until it starts morphing into a sci-fi psyche-shredder.

From the opening minutes I was immediately hypnotized by the mystical atmosphere, pulled in tight, my face pressed against every texture.…

big fan of the Strugatsky Bros — I spent an absurd amount of time in the one bookstore in little russia in SF desperately hunting down more Noon Universe stuff — since they have a kind of Stanislaw Lem, harsh view of the universe. what is that harsh view? that you’re not going to understand it. 

it’s a big universe, with inexplicable stellar phenomena we don’t really know how to address. we don’t know how other civilizations would work, or even if they’d be an intersocial hierarchal society. maybe aliens speak math, live in stellar wind, and exist as the gravity between crystalline decomposition — how the fuck are you gonna ask them to pass the tea? these motherfuckers ain’t…

Part of March Around the World 2016. Today: Estonia!

Never seen an Estonian film before - what a good start to get off to. This is based on a novel by the Strugatsky brothers, who also provided the source material for Aleksei German's Hard to be a God and Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker. Like those films, there is the sense of nature as a major antagonist, though the way that theme surfaces is very different. Rather than the brutal world of Arkanar, the central characters are placed in a luxurious Alpine hotel which becomes claustrophobic and frightening when they're cut off from the outside world by an avalanche.

If that synopsis sounds like it's setting up a classic murder mystery, director…

Filmed somewhere in the breathtakingly, bitter alpine mountains of Kazakhstan (the kinda place I dream of being in the midst of a blistering Arizona summer 🔥), Dead Mountaineer's Hotel starts as your standard noir should, an inspector is sent to follow up on a mysterious call placed at a hotel hidden deep within a remote valley, housing guests of a peculiar nature. After an avalanche hits the area, the power is cut, a body appears, and someone is murdered. The inspector then begins an all out investigation into the bizarre events.

In theory, I should like this. The chilling scenery, the droning synth, mystery in the mountains, thinly veiled social and political criticism involving sci-fi elements... a dog! 🐶 It's…

Okay then. I loved the contrast between the open bright white mountainscape and the claustrophobic dark hotel stuck at its feet. And Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel constantly makes clever use of it. Actually, the whole film feels like a visual exercise, but mostly in the sense that we rarely get a clear view of what’s going on in the frame plus there’s a cinematographer who can’t seem to keep his fingers off the zoom button.

From what I could tell the inside of the hotel is somewhat of a neon-noir maze, filled with hard shadows and oddball characters and some very soft new-wave background muzak. It makes a perfect fit for our very serious 70s Baltic inspector protagonist. But in spite of…