Stone

A young night watchman at the Chekhov house museum in Yalta finds a weary stranger moving through the closed rooms. The man seems to be the writer himself, come back cold and tired, asking for a bath, drinking tea, recognising his own belongings. What passes between them over one night is less a conversation than an act of keeping company: the watchman heats water, finds him clothes, sits beside him. Aleksandr Sokurov shot the film entirely in black and white, and with cinematographer Aleksandr Burov placed liquid in front of the lens so the frame melts and runs as if seen through wet glass. There is almost no plot, only the silence of a museum and the question of what it would mean for a dead writer to come home.