Set in the waning days of the Soviet era during Perestroika, this story centers on the Bashkirtsev family, led by Андрей Николаевич Башкирцев, a celebrated scientist and deputy of the Supreme Soviet. Upon returning from an abroad assignment, he senses he is being tailed. At his anniversary celebration, his son-in-law Константин Кологривов arrives with a provocative guest from Mosconcert, the enigmatic Валентин Компостеров. Valentin’s unsettling presence unsettles the party, and during a reckless magic trick he theatrically saws apart Konstantin’s wife, Лиза, Bashkirtsev’s elder daughter. He collapses drunk, and the next morning proclaims that he can no longer “reassemble” her halves now that “everything has healed.” From that moment, Valentin appears to inhabit the household as a literal malign spirit, sowing fear, misfortune, and death wherever he goes. Bashkirtsev responds by hiring bodyguards, and soon the apartment fills with more and more policemen, as the sense of danger intensifies and the family’s sense of security crumbles.
Meanwhile, Ника, Bashkirtsev’s younger daughter, crosses paths with a free-spirited young man named Тимофей on the busy Arbat Street. Timofey is a flute player who makes his home in an empty hangar, where he is fashioning a hot-air balloon from scavenged materials. A quiet romance grows between them, offering a counterpoint to the surrounding chaos and violence, and their budding relationship becomes a thread of hope amid growing peril.
After the aged Bashkirtsev dies and is laid to rest in a funeral that unfolds against a backdrop of kidnapping and torture by shadowy men, whose actions parody the clichés of KGB covert operations, the family makes a decision in grief and fear. They travel to the United States to be with Bashkirtsev’s eldest son, Boris, while Nika remains behind to finish her affairs. Valentin resurfaces, threatening Konstantin with death, and the tension explodes into a frantic escape. As Konstantin, Nika, and Timofey flee in a faded Pobeda, they are caught in a violent exchange in which a mentally disabled plumber known as Жора is tangled in the crossfire, and Valentin himself seems to perish only to reappear later in a wrecked car, his body mangled and unaccounted for.
The trio’s escape takes a surreal turn when they encounter Valentin again—this time seemingly alive and unscathed. They press on, and during their pursuit, the pursuer turns from threat to eerie revenant. In a tense showdown, Konstantin shoots him, and the supposed dead monster dissolves into water, defying explanation and defying the boundaries between fear and superstition.
As the trio ascends in the hot-air balloon, their fragile safety is shattered once more when the resurrected Valentin kills Kostya with a laser beam. Yet Timofey and Nika rally their courage and plan for a final reckoning. They manage to finish Valentin off for good—shooting him again, burning the evidence of his end, and even desecrating his corpse with a symbolic urination, a raw act of defiance against the terror that haunted Bashkirtsev’s home. The balloon becomes their fragile refuge as they rise into the sky, and the calm is short-lived, because KGB agents arrive at the scene, signaling that their cat-and-mouse ordeal is far from over, even as they escape into the open air and fly away toward an uncertain future.
Every frame threads together themes of power, fear, memory, and the collapse of a once-stable world. The film juxtaposes intimate family drama—the bonds between Лиза, Ника, and Timofey—with a creeping, almost supernatural menace embodied by Валентин Компостеров. The escalating tension permeates the Bashkirtsev household from a quiet, unnerving disquiet to a full-blown nightmare that blurs the line between psychology and the paranormal. In the end, love and resilience push back against domination and chaos, even as the shadow of the past lingers, promising that the echoes of Perestroika-era fear will continue to haunt those who dared to hope for a safer, freer future.
