The Dead Mountaineer Hotel

An anonymous phone call brings taciturn Inspector Peter Glebsky (Uldus Pucitis) to a remote mountain inn. The colourful residents all deny placing the call and insist that nothing is amiss, but after an avalanche cuts the hotel off from the outside world it becomes clear that Glebsky is very much needed as bodies and bizarre events begin to pile up. Seldom seen outside of the former Soviet Union, Grigori Kromanov’s Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel (adapted from the novel by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, authors of the original story and screenplay for Tarkovsky’s Stalker) is a sly sci-fi take on film noir, with its gritty, hardnosed antihero pitted against otherworldly forces that calls his stubborn realism into question. —TIFF Bell Lightbox