How to get to the eighth floor? "7...9" is a bright, unusual name, but extremely difficult to "google." Behind the significant three-point in it hides, or rather, hides from the hero ... the eighth floor of an ordinary nine-story building. Well, sometimes it is true to build offices without thirteenth floors (and in Japan – no fourth), but here is another case. The hero can not reach his own floor - neither by elevator nor by stairs. Then he takes a desperate step.
It turned out a brief but memorable story without a single replica, where everything is based on the experiences of the nameless hero, totem symbols (crow ... cockroach ...), and also on bold camera solutions - the camera is not afraid to look from the edge of the roof down, draw bold vertical and diagonal lines in space, creating an almost tangible 3D effect.
The director does not have much money at his disposal - an ordinary entrance and an elevator with a ladder - but this is enough to confuse the viewer, as if in an Escher picture, and then bring him out of the mathematical nonsense of not having an eighth floor on the roof with such a view that you want to immediately stop looking for the cursed floor and stay there like Carlson: But no. From the moment when the hero suddenly acquires the skills of an experienced rooftop rufer, you believe in the story a little less - but we get a good Hitchcock scene in the finale. The crow, like Edgar Poe, is always circling somewhere nearby, the Kafkaesque cockroach is helplessly trying to turn on its back, but history manages not to become a mathematical abstraction. For this, it is worth thanking the actor Mikhail Salin, who quite convincingly portrays the emotions of his hero - from slight surprise to almost madness.
The debut of director Fedor Korolev turned out to be memorable and promising even more in the future - we wish him luck!
9 out of 10