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Irksome, dazzling, baffling, eerie, luminous, silly, turgid and unique, The Dead Mountaineer's Hotel delights and frustrates in equal measure. It's easily the best Estonian sci-fi detective story I've ever seen. And yes, it's the only one.I believe Isaac Asimov had some kind of rule about detective stories being difficult in science fiction because if the reader doesn't know the rules, he or she can't fairly be expected to have a chance of guessing the answer to the mystery. This film certainly falls prey to that problem, as despite its occult atmosphere it doesn't tip its hand that anything truly out-of-this-world is going on until the third act. Once we're allowed to know the secret, the film ceases to be a mystery at all and actually works a lot better.First things: a detective arrives at the titular mountain resort, following up an anonymous tip. The hotel itself is dazzlingly...

The Twitch-presented series of Cold War era science fiction films from the Eastern Bloc continues on Sunday with a 7pm screening of Grigori Kromanov's The Dead Mountaineer's Hotel.When people ask me which films are the big discoveries of the program this one is normally my first response. An Estonian production based on a story by the Strugatsky Brothers - best known on these shores as the writers of Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker - this is a peculiar and compelling animal, a film that plays dominantly as a film noir ... at least until the hard boiled cop at the center of the mystery realizes that something otherworldly is going on.An anonymous phone call brings taciturn Inspector Peter Glebsky (Uldus Pucitis) to a remote mountain inn....