When a mute makeup/special effects artist working on a low-budget slasher film gets locked in a dilapidated Moscow movie studio late one night, she thinks she witnesses the making of a snuff film. Thus begins a night of terror.

Vitya is a teenage rock-music and motorbike fanatic whose father is arrested for embezzlement. Vitya is devastated, and in this state of shock he falls prey to a supposed mystic called Cassius.

This life period of the main character Felix (L. Lutvinsky) coincides with rather complicated period of country history Chernenko dies, Gorbachev succeeds him, then Ligachev criticizes Eltsin, county is reined by deficit, backstairs influence, queues, war in Afghanistan Having invented nothing better, electrical engineer escapes from reality and becomes a street cleaner. He is a kind of going underground, locking himself in a stuffy cleaners box room and pretending that nothing arouses his interest.

Based on the eponymous short story by I. Bunin.