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Released the year before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Karen Shakhnazarov’s absurdist satire Zerograd captures the disorientation and terror of gradually coming to realize that you live in a reality you no longer recognize. Arriving in a remote city in order to get a replacement for his company’s dysfunctional air conditioning unit, ordinary worker Alexei (Leonid Filatov) expects a short, uneventful visit before returning to Moscow. But when he runs into a secretary working in the nude at the manufacturing plant and witnesses a chef committing suicide after Alexei refused to eat a slice of cake that’s a full-size replica of his head, our protagonist is increasingly confronted with a world whose rules, behaviors, and morals are patently absurd. And, it turns out, he’s the only one that sees them as such.

There are certainly shades of Franz Kafka in this unnerving portrait of labyrinthine bureaucracy and existential despair,...

A truly fascinating rarity from the U.S.S.R., Karen Shahknazarov’s wickedly droll satire proves that the country Reagan called an ‘Evil Empire’ was radically changing in the late 1980s. Half Kafka paranoia and partly a Valentine to American freedoms, it takes the psychological temperature of a society that just plain no longer functions. Leonid Filatov’s unflappable engineer arrives in a rural Russian town and might as well be a Soviet Alice dropped down a rabbit hole — things get crazier and crazier, and nobody wants to let him in on the cosmic joke. The weird tale’s strength is its visual creativity, but it also generates an unexpected affection for its characters, nice people caught in a frustrating system.

Zerograd

Blu-ray

Deaf Crocodile

1988 / Color / 1:37 Academy / 103 min. / Gorod Zero, Zero City / Street Date November 29, 2022 / Available from / 39.98

Starring: Leonid Filatov, Oleg Basilashvili, Vladimir Menshov, Armen Dzhigarkhanyan, Evgeniy Evstigneev,...