The head doctor of a mental asylum finally finds his own intellectual equal-a patient-in this contemporary updating of one of Chekhov's darkest tales, filmed in a real asylum and with actual patients interspersed among the cast. Disheveled and bored with his fellow citizens' dullness, the thoughtful Dr. Ragin instead seeks the conversation of his “prized” patient, the paranoid schizophrenic Gromov, whose biting putdowns of society's-and Ragin's-pretensions soon leave the doctor as alienated as any “madman.” Director Shakhnazarov (whose work includes 2004's Rider Named Death and the surrealist 1988 satire Zerograd) boldly keeps nearly all of Chekhov's original dialogue intact, inserting its philosophical questioning and existential despair into a thoroughly modern Russia of strip clubs and traffic jams; the forms of excess may have changed, the film implies, but at heart we are all still embittered, uncertain, and anguished. Shot in an immediate quasi-documentary style, Ward No. 6 became a surprise commercial hit in Russia, and is that country's submission for this year's Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award.