Dead Man's Letters

Dead Man's Letters (original title: Pis'ma myortvogo cheloveka) was directed by Konstantin Lopushansky and released in 1986. It was his first feature-length film and was produced at the Lenfilm studio in Leningrad during the final years of the Soviet Union.

Yes, the screenplay was co-written by Boris Strugatsky — one half of the famous Strugatsky brothers whose novels include Roadside Picnic, the basis for Tarkovsky's Stalker — along with Vyacheslav Rybakov and Lopushansky himself. The Strugatsky connection places the film firmly within the tradition of intellectually serious Soviet science fiction.

The film takes place in an underground bunker following a nuclear holocaust, where a Nobel Prize-winning scientist writes letters to his son while surrounded by dying survivors and rising radiation. The claustrophobic, despairing atmosphere draws heavy visual and thematic inspiration from Tarkovsky's Stalker, but Lopushansky pushes further into explicit post-apocalyptic horror.

The film has had limited Western distribution but has been released on Blu-ray by specialty labels focusing on restored Soviet and Eastern European cinema. It periodically screens at retrospectives of Soviet science fiction but is not widely available on mainstream streaming platforms, so physical media or curated festival programming are the most reliable ways to see it.