('Hukkunud Alpinisti' hotell, Отель «У Погибшего Альпиниста»)
Directed by Grigori Kromanov
93 minutes
In Estonian with English subtitles

Here is an Estonian sci-fi film conjured up during the Soviet era. It's based on a 1970 novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, who also wrote the screenplay for this project. They are probably best known to cinephiles in the west as the Russian brothers responsible for penning Andrei Tarkovsky's supernatural film Stalker. 

This is a moody flick with an otherworldly weird East-bloc feel. It starts out quite straightforward, when the police are called out to an isolated hotel in the alps. Soon after the detective arrives there is an avalanche that cuts him off from the rest of the world, and then the weirdness kicks off from there. The titular hotel is full of mysterious characters, pseudo-murders, possible doppelgängers and seeming aliens. All of this plays out with a mood so thick you could cut it with a knife. After a while there is no criteria anymore to interpret any event as either real or unreal. 

Is it Tarkovskiesque? Yes, there are connections... but also maybe David Lynch and David Cronenberg seem to be lurking around. In fact this flick can be experienced as a much darker Twin Peaks, and with a very different kind of humor and statement. It was the last movie of the obscure Estonian director Grigori Kromanov, and became a huge hit in Estonia, Russia and East Germany, but was blocked from entering Western Europe so has remained totally unknown in these parts for all these years. A dream world in the vast snowy landscape, with a fantastic synthesizer score by Sven Grünberg, a pioneer of electronic music in Estonia. Featuring Juri Jarvet, who also starred in Tarkovsky's Solaris.