In a small, dingy Russian town, Dima (Artem Bystrov) discovers a crack in a bearing wall of a housing project holding 820 people. Convinced the building can’t last more than 24 hours, Dima races the clock to convince the city authorities, the mayor (an excellent Natalya Surkova) and the tenants themselves, to evacuate.
Yuriy Bykov’s movie on the surface is another tale of Slavic squalor, full of filthy apartments and no-hope workers. The story line plays as a thriller, however, which helps keep the in-your-face symbolic content from getting too dull (we know, we get it, Putin’s Russia is a cesspool).
He may be saddled with an overly ironic title role, but Bystrov is terrific. His cowboy squint and dogged intelligence are enough to give you hope for Russia, although the movie certainly won’t.