Late winter 1953. A military surgeon, General Yuri Georgievich Klensky, finds himself a target of an anti-Semitic conspiracy accusing Jewish doctors in Moscow of planning to assassinate the Soviet elite. Pursued and abused, Yuri is chased and dragged through a Stalinist Soviet nightmare.

Liberally adapted from Joseph Brodsky’s “In a Room and a Half,” this slippery and surreal, paranoid, and poetic postwar satire by Aleksei German (Hard to Be a God) is truly one of a kind. Both a mesmerizing feat of filmmaking and an inventive portrait of Stalin’s Russia.