Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel

The 1979 Estonian classic science-fiction film incredibly titled Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel follows Inspector Peter Glebsky, played by the “Latvian Harrison Ford” Uldis Pūcītis, responding to a call from a hotel in a snowstorm. He arrives to find that the only death took place a while ago. The hotel used to belong to the “Dead Mountaineer.” His uber-intelligent and dutifully obedient St. Bernard still helps the hotel staff with check-ins. Inspector Glebsky meets a very strange array of hotel guests and isn’t there too long before he confirms, like his call, that there is something strange happening — potentially even an extra-terrestrial kind of strange. 

The first of three filmic adaptations (plus a video game) of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s book of the same name insists on being unorthodox. From the setting to potentially gender-queer characters to the film’s androgynous use of genre, Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel resists the ordinary in favor of the idiosyncratic and renegade.

Estonian director Grigori Kromanov’s Dead Mountaineer is usually described as science fiction because the Strugatsky brothers wrote the screenplay and as an Agatha Christie-style detective story since that’s what they were going for. This misses the catalyzing intentionally trans-genre themes. At the same time that it is science fiction or mystery, it plays with the film language of giallo, film noir, romance, and utter abstraction. It is all of genres and none at the same time, putting on the performance of whatever “genre” is most helpful for any given scene. The strangeness of the genre transitions communicates that anything is possible under this hotel roof. And the fluidity of the trans-genreness is also ironically essential to the science-fiction mystery at the core: Are all of these guests as human as they appear? 

Glebsky starts by investigating the usual questions: Who was murdered? Who did it and why? Before things get strange and shift to unexplainable things like murders that aren’t murderers. The detective story takes a sharp turn as the film winds down and pivots home to sci-fi where questions about aliens, robots, space travel, and strange technologies go unanswered. And in many ways, that’s how the Strugatsky brothers use science fiction: to point to the inexplicable in our world. 

One scene that gives no clear answers does this particularly well. Glebsky walks around the hotel as he pieces bits of the puzzle together over a monologue when he sits down and watches what is on the television. What’s on TV is what appears to be a muted newsreel of some sort of people jumping out of a burning high-rise in a metropolitan area far from the hotel and falling to their deaths. It looks like footage from our world, perhaps the Joelma Building fire in 1974. He watches the tragedy as he tries to make sense of the tragedy in the hotel, then he gets up and continues his investigation. Nothing makes sense in this hotel. And when nothing makes sense, we are prone to come up with crazy answers.

The hotel is in the middle of an unnamed mountain range and appears far away from any city. The architecture of the building consists of a plethora of Lego-like geometries stacked next to each other. It’s a strange, oblique and modern building that then becomes a mix of art-deco, Eastern European neon pop-art, and Nordic ski resort on the interior. The rooms are constricting and the claustrophobic cinematography from Jüri Sillart helps to convey the oppressive proximity of the interior. Almost the entirety of the film is shot in intense close-ups or two shots with one face brushing up against the camera and the other in mid-range still in focus. While the Soviet Union was home to some of the coolest things to ever happen in architecture, the building is an architectural oddity. The clash of its exterior and interior, as well as its location, makes the hotel a liminal space with a thin veil separating it from the rest of the world. This is heightened by an avalanche that traps the guests in (and keeps the rest of the world out).

Like the building, Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel is aesthetically contrarian. This is not what Soviet films typically looked like in the 1970s and 1980s. They didn’t have androgynous characters, progressive rock, or morally susceptible cops. They also weren’t typically set in the West. Despite being filmed in Kazakhstan and spoken in Estonian, tourism signs can be read in French and the outside looks like the Alps with the alpine trees and modernist hotel design. They also weren’t shot with so many invasive close-ups or sounded with formalist electronic scores that come through in fragmented sequences rather than as united musical compositions. Very little about the film is typical or predictable.

The fragmented and piecemeal score from Sven Grünberg on the EMS Synthi 100 carries the science-fiction atmosphere by sounding stranger, as if it were made for different artistic sensibilities, than “human music.” This may also be why the production had some difficulty with Grünberg’s score (composed on Western synths). Maarja Merivoo-Parro, executive editor of Estonia’s largest music station, Raadio 2, notes for Deep Baltic that the world famous Estonian composer Arvo Pärt was originally supposed to write the music before backing out for emigration related reasons. Young newcomer Grünberg was eventually given the reins, though his time with the EMS 100 was limited to just a few hours and the Goskino USSR (State Committee for Cinematography) thought “Ball” was an illegally smuggled Pink Floyd song. (I, admittedly, Shazamed the song thinking the same. At the least, it seems impossible to get to “Ball” without Floyd.)

Kromanov’s last film came out only a few months after another adaptation of the Strugatsky brothers’ novels. Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker adapted their Roadside Picnic into one of the most important science-fiction films ever made. Both 1979 Strugatsky brothers adaptations have deep Estonian connections too. Tarkovsky shot most of the film in and around Tallinn. Kromanov himself is Estonian and Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel uses Estonian dialogue. His crew also shot the interior scenes at a tennis hall in Tallinn, though they shot the exterior on the far east side of the USSR. Jüri Järvet, most widely known for his role as Dr. Snaut in Tarkovsky’s Solaris, plays the hotel innkeeper too.

Baltic cinema is a cinema of collaboration. Today, much of that happens externally. Estonia makes lots of films with Finland, Lithuania with Poland and Germany, and Latvia with a consortium of other small European countries. They rely on each other as sites of co-production and co-creation more than their non-Baltic neighbors (with the exception perhaps of Estonia and Finland) and this has been the case in both Soviet and post Soviet times. In Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel, one doesn’t need to look past the cast to figure this out. The lead of the film, Uldis Pūcītis, is Latvian and can’t speak Estonian! His lines had to be dubbed in Estonian, although the camera often conceals his mouth when he speaks as if to hide this the best they can. 

Lithuanian talent also helped. One of the side characters, Brun, is played by Lithuanian actress Nijolė Oželytė, and Irena Veisaitė, the co-director and Kromanov’s wife, is also from the southernmost Baltic state. In the novel, Brun has an unidentified sex; Oželytė is certainly more feminine than androgynous, but her partner Olaf (Tiit Härm), while still clearly masculine in some ways, has a bit of David Bowie to him — adding another element of unorthodox category-bending to things. (The couple is pictured above.) The hodgepodge of nationalities in the talent helps point to the film’s more cosmopolitan and larger-than-this-world themes.

Inspector Glebsky’s reflections regarding what happened that winter and how he acted frame the whole film. He ponders duty, responsibility, and the rule of law in the face of mystery and the uncomfortable. A physicist staying at the hotel parses out that a few of the guests are aliens, a few robots, and Glebsky thinks another one of them is a human terrorist. Very little on-screen evidence can be used to confirm the extraordinary theories. It’s mostly hearsay and Occam’s razor used to explain the ineffable events at the Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel. Glebsky acts decisively as if this is true. At the least, he thinks they are all criminals if they are human. A small part of him doubts this though. Was he just an orthodox man of the law all along? Or was the system of law and order that he slavishly followed creating the conditions for justice all along? 

Streaming on Klassiki through September 4.