Zerograd 1988

Alexei Varakin, Leonid Filatov, an engineer from Moscow, travels to a nameless town in the Soviet Union for a routine business trip. On arrival at the factory, his pass is missing, creating immediate friction with the local routine. Inside, the manager’s secretary, Elena Arzhanik, is working naked, yet no one seems surprised by the odd scene. The manager remains unaware of the chief engineer’s death, a detail that will quietly haunt the day’s events.

During lunch at an empty restaurant, Alexei is offered a cake shaped like his head—a harmless joke that he refuses. The cook who prepared the cake, however, is deeply upset by the moment and ultimately takes his own life, casting a pall over the town and signaling that not everything here is as it seems.

After giving his statement to the authorities, Alexei tries to depart, but all train tickets are sold out. His growing desperation to return to Moscow is met with indifference, and his pleas go unanswered. A taxi driver redirects him to a remote spot housing an underground local history museum, where the museum’s caretaker, Evgeniy Evstigneev, presents Alexei with a diverse exhibition spanning eras from the Trojans to Romans to Soviet leaders, a surreal survey of human culture that foreshadows the town’s strange currents.

That night, Alexei finds shelter at the home of a local electrician, Aleksandr Bespalyy, whose son Misha confidently proclaims that he will never leave the town, even offering intimate details about Alexei’s life and future plans that feel strikingly prescient. Later, a local driver named Anna, Tatyana Khvostikova, offers to drive him to Perebrodino station for trains bound for Moscow. A black police Volga intercepts them, and the town’s investigator, Aleksei Zharkov, informs Varakin that his biological father was a deceased cook named Nikolayev and reveals that his own name is Mahmud, a startling lineage that unsettles him further.

The town’s prosecutor, Vladimir Menshov, who secretly harbors a desire to commit a crime, confronts Varakin with the truth: what was believed to be a suicide was in fact a premeditated murder. They head to the summer house of poet Vasily Chugunov, Oleg Basilashvili, where he and others come to terms with the past. There, they learn that the cook Nikolayev in town used to be a famous rock ’n’ roll dancer, a detail that reshapes the town’s memory and adds a chilling edge to the narrative. The opening of the Nikolayev Rock ’n’ Roll Fans Club becomes a backdrop for broader political and personal tensions, as prominent locals mingle in the glow of a fragile democracy.

As the night deepens, the prosecutor’s disquiet grows; he attempts to shoot himself with his service weapon, but the gun misfires several times, a moment that blurs the line between intention and failure. A group from the dance party, led by Alexei, heads to the legendary 1,000-year-old oak tree that locals believe grants power to those who dare to cut its branches. The tree itself is dying, yet the crowd still gathers to claim a piece of its legacy, gathering branches as mementos. In a troubling turn, the prosecutor offers Alexei a chance to escape; after fleeing through a forest, he discovers an abandoned boat without oars and decides to ride the current, letting the river carry him toward an uncertain future.

This tale weaves a slow-burn mood of tension and curiosity, anchored by a cast of complex figures who drift between loyalty and self-interest, their fates intertwined through a town that feels both timeless and uneasy. The interplay of memory, ambition, and mortality lingers long after Alexei’s final, improvisational decision at the river’s edge.