When a young woman kills her child and herself, Detective Andrey Konstantinovich is called in to fill out the routine paperwork and to try and establish some sort of motive. But when he meets the deceased woman's lover, he tells Andrey to just let it go, and not to get involved. There are apparently supernatural forces at work that drove this woman to suicide. Soon enough, Andrey meets Marina, the woman's beautiful sister, and falls in love with her, but with his newfound love comes newfound horror; the ghost of Marina's father, who haunted her late sister, is also haunting her. It turns out her father is a vengeful spirit known as a frozie, whose only goal is to torment the living and drive them to suicide. His next targets are none other than Andrey, Marina, and her little daughter. Made on almost no budget a year after the collapse of the Soviet Union, The Contact is a genuinely spine-tingling film. Slowly building up to an explosive conclusion, it is seeped in a quintessential Russian atmosphere; cold, grimy, oppressive, snowy, and gray. Very much Lovecraftian in nature, this is not a joyous or uplifting film by any means, it is full of sorrow and anguish, there is no respite for its weary characters. A review on IMDb says the director, Albert S. Mkrtchyan almost suffered the same tragic fate as his protagonist, and did not make another movie for almost two decades, right before he died. There are some problems here, though, dialogue heavy scenes tend to drag on, especially in the first half of the film, and the copy available is ripped from a shoddy VHS. This is a film in desperate need of restoration, as much of the visual atmosphere is buried under blur, grain, and bad contrast. But for fans of horror and Russian cinema, this one is a must-see regardless.
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