Dead Man’s Letters
Even in a subgenre as cited for its gloom and severity because the publish-apocalyptic film, konstantin lopushansky’s lifeless guy’s letters stands proud for its entire and utter grimness. A nuclear bomb has reduced a town to little more than a heap of rubble strewn with corpses, and the few survivors have taken shelter in underground bunkers.
Considered one of them, a nobel prize-triumphing scientist, professor larsen (rolan bykov), spends his time inside the basement of a museum writing letters to a son who will nearly absolutely never study them. A protégé of tarkovsky, lopushansky favors lengthy, ruminative tracking pictures that allow us, as in stalker, to sense as if we’re without a doubt part of the film’s uncanny fact. The whole thing right here is bathed in an eerie yellow glow, a consistent reminder of the tainted surroundings the characters inhabit and a mighty visual metaphor for the air of despondency that hangs over this international. While the film in the end closes on a slightly hopeful notice, what certainly hits home is lopushansky’s despairing vision of a species seemingly purpose on its own destruction. As one man or woman places it, “the whole records of mankind is a tale of a slow suicide.”