This is one of those films which looks just incredible.
Not that it looks like any other film you’ve seen.
Instead, it had a beautifully strange aesthetic, with weird set pieces that are meant to represent a future city, even if they are clearly flats and hanging scenery elements on a stage-bound set.
And a somewhat small set at that.
Add to this an impressive (job of lighting (suspiciously like that of a stage play), dark enough to hide a lot of this set in shadows, while bright enough we can clearly make out the human characters wandering through that space and it is as if someone deliberately tried to adapt this story as a stage play (not that I am sure that some of the sequences would have worked on stage). But, like a play, it has a limited number of sets, and some very surreal representations of many of the spaces within the film, all staged within a relatively small space.
Now one could see this as a purely artistic choice, but the truth is that a lot of Russian television was made this way: with limited resources and more or less staged like a play (see, for example, my comments on Monday Begins on Saturday) — and productions like this would continue to be made at least into the Eighties, with the Stanislaw Lem adaptation, Malysh.
Although to be fair, the opening sequence reminds me more of the abstract art and lighting of the Swedish TV movie Aniara.
Some moving men show up on day at the apartment of a middle-aged writer named Klempner, bringing with them a large and mysterious box. It proves to be a robot servant, and the company that sent it has no record of ever sending a robot to his address.
Klempner is a bit of a Sadsack, and the thought of having a Robot servant capable of actually preparing good meals is more than he can resist.
Even if his new robot is extremely annoying
Unfortunately what he doesn’t realize is that the robot is one the police have been secretly looking for, one who has not only murdered a few former masters, but who has his own secret project he’s working on…
While the cityscape and the basement stairs are heavily abstracted and a bit surreal, the scenes in Klempner’s apartment and his get-togethers with his friends are in a far more realistic style. The film quality is also notably different for those scenes — particularly the get-togethers. It looks like they might have been shot on a low-density film stock, and I am reminded by that often sharp distinction you find in some of the older BBC shows, between the interiors shot on video and exteriors shot on film.
Lem originally wrote the story as a TV play back in 1961, although I have no idea whether it was ever actually broadcast at the time. Four years later, this version appeared on Russian television.
I’ll confess that I enjoyed this little film: not only is it stylish and surreal, but quite funny as well. The story grows more and more absurd as it goes on and it all ends on a nicely ironic note, when things come so close to working out perfectly.
Yes, it is a very minimal sort of production, but it is entertaining and clever, with an unexpected sting in the tail.
It’s a minor treasure and worth a look if you are into Soviet era science fiction.
And, best of all, a good copy with subs is now available…
rivets on the poster 
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