Dead Man's Letters (), also known as Letters from a Dead Man, is a 1986 Soviet post-apocalyptic drama film directed and written by Konstantin Lopushansky. He wrote it along with Vyacheslav Rybakov and Boris Strugatsky. It marks his directorial debut.
The film was screened at the International Critics' Week section of the Cannes Film Festival in 1987 and received the FIPRESCI prize at the 35th International Filmfestival Mannheim-Heidelberg.
In the aftermath of nuclear apocalypse, a group of people are forced to live underground in bunkers. They cannot go outside their dwellings without wearing protective clothing and gas masks. They try to find hope in the disturbing new world. Among these people is a history teacher who tries to contact via letters his missing son.
Plot
The film is set in a town after a nuclear war; the town is destroyed and polluted with radioactive elements. The main character, Professor Larsen, played by Rolan Bykov, is a Nobel Prize in Physics laureate, who lives in the basement of a museum along with his sick wife and several other people who used to work at the museum. He often writes letters to his son Eric, though he has no way of contacting him. Larsen believes the war has ended and that more surviving humans exist outside the central bunker, but nobody else believes his theories.
Larsen visits an orphanage where the current caretaker of the surviving children explains that she's thinking of evacuating to the central bunker, though may have to leave the children behind as they likely won't be allowed in since they're sick, to Larsen's disapproval. Larsen is informed that he also might be rejected from entering the central bunker due to his old age. With his wife's health declining, Larsen sneaks past several soldiers during curfew hours and attempts to find medicine for his wife, escaping from a military raid in the process. When he returns to the museum's basement, however, he finds that his wife died. The other museum employees bury her body.
In one of his letters to Eric, Larsen tells a darkly humorous story on how someone failed to prevent the nuclear war. According to him, an operator from an electronics center had a chance to cancel the first missile launch (which happened due to a computer error), but was unable to reach the computer in time to abort the launch as he was slowed down by a cup of coffee in his hands. The operator then hung himself in return.
Larsen makes a trip to the central bunker in an effort to find Eric. After sneaking into a medical facility, he enters the children's department, only to find all the children sick, injured, and screaming in agony, much to Larsen's horror.
After returning to the museum's basement, he finds that a museum employee is about to take his life as he thinks the history of mankind has ended and that mankind was doomed from the very beginning. He then leaves the group, lies down in a grave, and shoots himself dead, to the horror of his son. Later, while salvaging books from a flooded library, Larsen talks with a man who disagrees with his theory on how there's hope for mankind, referencing how Jesus said mankind was doomed.
Larsen visits the orphanage where he learns the children were rejected from entering the central bunker. The caretaker leaves the children for Larsen to look after, as she is evacuating to the central bunker herself. The remaining museum employees also evacuate to the central bunker, though Larsen stays behind to look after the children (it's assumed they're the only people left in the town). On Christmas Day, Larsen creates a makeshift Christmas tree out of sticks and candles while the children design Christmas ornaments to decorate it with. In his final letter to Eric, Larsen writes that he finally found purpose in life and that he hopes his son doesn't leave him alone in the world.
The final scene is narrated by one of the children Larsen looked after, who explains that Larsen died some time later. On his deathbed, he told the children to leave the museum and find somewhere else to go while they have the strength, still believing that life exists elsewhere. The film ends with the children wandering through the apocalyptic landscape together, their fates unknown.