Column Science Fiction Film Club Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel: A Disorienting Twist on the Classic Locked-Room Mystery A detective story gets very weird, thanks to the Strugatsky brothers and some aliens. By Kali Wallace | Published on February 18, 2026 Credit: Tallinnfilm Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Tallinnfilm Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel (“Hukkunud Alpinisti” hotell) (1979) Directed by Grigori Kromanov. Written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, based on their novel of the same name. Starring Uldis Pūcītis, Jüri Järvet, Lembit Peterson, and Mikk Mikiver. A car creeps along a snow-covered road, surrounded on all sides by high, jagged peaks. It’s headed toward an isolated hotel that sits alone in a vast wilderness. A voiceover provides a framing device from the driver’s point of view: This is his memory of something that happened years ago, something he has not told anybody about, because he does not know how to tell them. The music is sparse and eerie. The mountains are so steep they could be cliffs. Hang gliders soar over the valley. The film’s opening is not, in fact, a snowy homage to the opening of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980); this movie came out a year before that one and was filmed at about the same time. But the films’ opening minutes have similar effects, carrying the audience and the narrative directly into a beautiful but remote mountainous unknown, with the soundtrack confidently warning us that something bad will happen. Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel takes place in the mountains of some unnamed, possibly imaginary, Western European country, but in reality the exterior scenes were filmed in the Tien Shan of Kazakhstan. The production built the hotel’s façade for the wide shots and exterior scenes. In some places, the mountain backdrops are actually collages made up of silver paper. The interior scenes were filmed in Tallin, Estonia; the filmmakers built the interior of the hotel, with that maze of hallways and staircases, inside a then-new sports complex. It was an expensive project for the time, but the effort and expense were very much worth it, because it’s a beautiful movie. More than that, it’s just so aesthetically interesting in the composition and style of even individual scenes. Director Grigori Kromanov and cinematographer Jüri Sillart, both of them renowned and well-respected in the Estonian film world, crafted a film that looks as strange as it feels, with blindingly bright daylight contrasted against artfully dark interiors, long smooth pans and abrupt shaky cam moments, odd angles and uncomfortable close-ups, and a cast of characters who look more and more uncanny as the story progresses. The electronic score by Sven Grünberg is also great; it’s odd and understated and sets an unsettling tone from the start. The car’s driver is a cop, Inspector Peter Glebsky (Uldis Pūcītis—Pūcītis was the only Latvian actor in an otherwise fully Estonian cast; his dialogue is dubbed by Aarne Üksküla.) He has come to the eponymous Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel to follow up on a tip from a mysterious phone call, which told him there was crime afoot. He heads into the dark, shadowy interior, which is dominated by a neon-lit portrait of the dead mountaineer (who looks a little bit like John Lennon). The climber fell to his death and left a very good dog behind. The dog, Lell (played by an uncredited St. Bernard), is very large and very fluffy and I want to hug him. The hotel’s manager, Alex Snewahr (Jüri Järvet), tells Glebsky that no crime has occurred and he’s not sure why the police were called. Glebsky calls his captain to tell him there’s nothing wrong at the hotel, but he’ll just stay overnight rather than make the journey back down. He also says there is fog in the mountains, which is funny because the exterior scenes show a crystal clear day with visibility for miles, but who can blame him for wanting a night off work? Glebsky meets the other guests at the hotel: the consumptive businessman Hinckus (Mikk Mikiver), the amorous young hang gliders Olaf (Tiit Härm) and Brun (Nijolė Oželytė), the eccentric physicist Simon Simonet (Lembit Peterson), the sour Mr. Moses (Kārlis Sebris) and flirtatious Mrs. Moses (Irena Kriauzaitė). Most of them enjoy dinner, billiards, drinks, and dancing as night falls. Many of the guests are very eccentric, but there’s no sign of anything illegal—not until Glebsky discovers that somebody has slipped a note into his pocket to warn him that Hinckus is a notorious criminal. That’s when things start to get weird. And when they get weird, they get very weird. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky published their novel The Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel (or Inn) (Отель «У Погибшего Альпиниста») in 1970, and it’s a bit of an odd duck in their long and prolific careers as renowned sci fi writers. Boris Strugatsky wrote in his memoir that they conceived of the book because they wanted to play around with the tropes found in classic English-language detective fiction. These tropes are easily recognizable, even if one doesn’t read much from the Golden Era of detective fiction; they are the genre conventions that go along with a mystery writer playing fair with the reader, such as assuming that the killer will be among the named characters, the reader should have the necessary information for solving the crime, and the explanation should be realistic and rational. The Strugatsky brothers were sci fi writers, so of course they wanted to twist that requirement for a detective story to be firmly grounded in mundane reality by crafting a story that begins in one genre before veering into another. In the end, they didn’t think it was a successful literary experiment, but I haven’t read it, so I don’t know if they were being too hard on themselves. If anybody has read it, I would love to hear what you think in comments! (There is a 2015 English translation by Josh Billings that’s readily available.) That literary genre experiment underlies the film version as well, as the Strugatsky brothers also wrote the screenplay. (I have no idea if there was a translator involved; I looked around but couldn’t find any info about that.) I think that experiment is a big part of what makes the movie so interesting, even though it might not quite work overall. We enter the story firmly in Glebsky’s point of view and remain there throughout. He is comfortable in his position of authority. He believes in law and order. He is convinced that he is more rational than everybody around him. He certainly doesn’t believe in any nonsense like aliens or zombies. Now, as anybody who has ever argued with anybody on the internet knows, there is little in the world less trustworthy than the perspective of a man who believes himself uniquely intelligent and rational. When odd events start happening at the Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel, Glebsky is completely unequipped to handle it. A whole lot of things happen, and while I always take notes, I may have gotten the order of some of these wrong: An avalanche cuts the hotel off from the rest of the world. Simonet tells Glebsky that Mrs. Moses is dead, but it turns out she’s just fine. Glebsky finds Hinckus tied to his bed, and Hinckus claims it was a doppelganger who tied him up. Olaf actually is dead, and Glebsky confiscates a suitcase from the crime scene that contains a strange technological device nobody can explain. A stranger named Luarvik (Sulev Luik) emerges suddenly from the wilderness and demands to see Olaf, even though he can’t explain how he knows Olaf or even what Olaf looks like. He also wants the mysterious suitcase. Sometimes people appear to shapeshift. Hinckus admits to being a member of a criminal gang, so Glebsky is briefly vindicated. But it doesn’t last, because the next thing he knows Simonet is telling him that Mr. Moses and Luarvik are extraterrestrial visitors from another world, while Mrs. Moses and Olaf are their robot companions. They were never supposed to get involved with humans, but Mr. Moses kinda sorta accidentally joined Hinckus’ group of criminals and terrorists (the subtitles on the version I watched switched between those terms), thinking he was helping humanity with some noble fight. The aliens want Olaf’s suitcase back so they can leave Earth. They are in danger, they explain, because they are believed to be terrorists, the military is looking for them, and they will be killed if they can’t get away. We can’t really blame Glebsky for responding to this revelation with “lol wtf.” That’s a fair reaction when somebody tells you they are aliens from outer space. The trouble is, he knows that there is more to their story. His gut is telling him there is something weird going on here. But he refuses to entertain his doubts, even though he is sympathetic toward the strangers. He can’t explain the doppelgangers, the shapeshifting, the people who are dead but not dead, and so he doesn’t try. He just decides that’s not how things work. It doesn’t fit into his view of the world as a rational place and of himself as a rational person, so he dismisses their story against his own instincts. He desperately wants to be able to appeal to authority. He wants his police captain to tell him what to do, but the phone lines are still down. So Glebsky does not help them. That’s left to Simonet and Snewahr, who restrain Glebsky long enough to return the suitcase. It’s too late, however, because a military helicopter is already on the way to hunt down the supposed terrorists, and it kills the alien visitors as they are trying to flee. It must be said that the fact that they try to flee by, uh, speed-gliding across the snow on the backs of their robots makes this scene a bit silly rather than tense. That is unfortunate, as it’s exactly the wrong point in the film to laugh at unintentional humor. But they look so silly—then they get blown up, and it’s not silly anymore. It’s a dark ending, but the real kicker comes in the tag at the end. We circle back to Glebsky’s opening voiceover, when he’s recalling the incident from some time afterward. He’s sitting in room, speaking plainly and directly, justifying his decision. He did the right thing, he says, because he was doing his duty as an officer of the law. He reasons that if they were criminals, they got what they deserved, and if they weren’t criminals, they weren’t people, and why should he care what happens to them? It’s such a chilling statement to end on. It’s also perhaps a bit unusual that so obvious a critique of authority passed the Soviet censors in a state-funded movie made for mainstream release—but, of course, that’s why the film is set in an unnamed Western European country, why the secret criminal messages are written in French, why the characters have names like Moses and Simonet. I guess you could slip political commentary past the censors as long as you pretended to be criticizing the French. So many alien visitation films are a way of nudging us to ask questions about ourselves and our treatment of people we regard as “the other”: How do we react when we meet people who aren’t like us? Do we fixate on similarities or differences? How do we treat people who are strange, unexpected, or frightening? Sometimes that premise is made wholesome and heartwarming by focusing on the humans who help, such as in Escape to Witch Mountain (1975), E.T. (1982) and Starman (1984). Sometimes it’s bittersweet commentary on human connection, such as Man Facing Southeast (1986). And sometimes it’s an obvious metaphor meant to say a specific thing about a particular topic, like The Man Who Fell To Earth (1979) and The Brother From Another Planet (1984). Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel goes about it in a somewhat inside-out way, as it’s told from the point of view of the representative of authority who is so often the antagonist in other films. It offers a grim but believable answer to the question of what a person who believes himself to be righteous might do when faced with people who don’t fit into his rigid worldview: follow orders, refuse to bend, and justify violence by insisting the other deserves it. Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel was reasonably popular when it was released; one article states that more than 17 million people watched it in the year after its release, although I don’t know where they got that number from. That’s a small number for Russian-language Soviet films in the ’70s and ’80s, but it’s a huge number for an Estonian film. The movie is a bit more obscure these days, but it retains a small and steady cadre of admirers both within Estonian film circles and more broadly among cinephiles who like an odd, beautiful genre-bending experiment. I think I can confidently count myself among that number now, because I quite liked this film. It has shaky parts that don’t quite work, but I’d rather a film (or book, story, etc.) try something strange and fail than not try anything interesting at all. It has such a weird story and a cool, unsettling visual style that I was fully engrossed all the way through. What did you think of Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel? You won’t judge me if I admit I added this film to my list initially because I liked the title, will you? Next week: We wrap up our month of alien visitors with a trip to Scotland in Under the Skin. Find it streaming in a few places.[end-mark] The post <i>Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel</i>: A Disorienting Twist on the Classic Locked-Room Mystery appeared first on Reactor.