A Tourist (Viktor Mikhaylov), on vacation, is traveling through a post-apocalyptic world to visit the ruins of a museum that used to be part of a large city but is now flooded. The museum is located at the bottom of a dead ocean and can only be accessed at low tide. Low tide lasts for seven days. It takes three days to reach the museum and three days to walk back. The bottom of the ocean is blanketed with poisonous sludge. Many who have made the pilgrimage to the museum have drowned or gotten lost and never returned.
The Tourist’s journey takes him across a devastated landscape to get to what is called the garbage train. The garbage train wanders through miles of garbage. At the end of the line is a coastal area that has an inn to accommodate guests. The inn used to be an old weather station. Near the inn is a reservation that houses people that have been mentally or physically deformed as a result of the apocalypse, and of children born since then. They are referred to as degenerates. The inn is run by an older husband and wife team (Vera Mayorova and Vadim Lobanov). They employee two of the degenerates to help maintain the inn and try to educate them enough to be functional in what is left of society. The Tourist finds out later that they are not employees but are the adult children of the older couple.
The Tourist is told that he needs to report to the degenerates’ reservation to sign a registration form and responsibility waiver before he will be allowed to make his trek out to the museum. The degenerates have a religious foundation in their culture. Part of it centers around a monastery at the edge of the reservation. After he signs the form, the Tourist needs to wait until low tide before he can complete the final leg of his journey. While waiting he becomes interested in the religion that the degenerates have adopted. He decides to visit the monastery. He learns that the museum has a religious significance to them. The Visitor begins suffering from headaches and night terrors. Soon the degenerates learn of his intent to make a pilgrimage to the museum and come to believe that he is their messiah.
“Visitor Of A Museum” AKA “Visitor To A Museum” AKA “Posetitel muzeya” was released in 1989 and was written and directed by Konstantin Lopushansky. It is a Russian, West German, Swiss, science fiction horror drama.
The movie is very long and very confusing, but cinematically splendid. Atmospheric and symbolic the movie doesn’t specifically state what the apocalypse was that devastated the planet. There’s lots of red and lots of dark, sometimes to the point where you can’t really see what is going on. Whether that is intentional or not, I’m not sure.
The film is basically steeped in symbolism and religious imagery. It is 2 hours and 8 minutes of artistic visual metaphors and similes. Nobody has a name because the people aren’t important. It is the overall feel of the film that is foremost. It is depressing and fatalistic. The ending is slightly ambiguous and there are questions that arise throughout the film that go unanswered. It is one of those movies that you need to be in the right mood to watch, and to retain your interest in what happens, despite how glorious and shiny it looks.