1953, somewhere in a nocturnal, wintry Russia: ominous black cars patrol the streets; every flat contains a spy; and a paranoid Stalin is dying, yet still orchestrating his infamous “Doctor's Plot” purge, which imprisoned and killed many predominantly Jewish doctors. Into this real-life terror plunges Alexei Guerman's mesmerizing, unrelenting film maudit, which follows a military doctor living obliviously on the edge of doom-until, that is, a knock on the door arrives. Visually and aurally manic, with every frame crammed full of people and objects and a camera constantly on the move across apartments, streets, and trains, Khrustalyov thrusts viewers deep into a collective nightmare where-befitting the times-meaning barely exists, only hallucinations and chaos. Indeed, Khrustalyov is arguably not a film, but a frenzied state of mind, and one of the most astounding, exhilarating works of nineties cinema. “An orchestrated cataclysm, a narrative inferno that demands to be inhabited rather than decoded,” wrote Jonathan Romney for Sight & Sound. “It is Russian cinema's answer to Finnegan's Wake.”