A wave of suicides rolls through the small town of Salimov. The dead are young people who all work at the same factory. What united them wasn’t only that—they all drank heavily. Not long before their deaths, locals began to notice that the behavior of these drunken youths was changing: they often went silent mid-sentence, staring in horror at something behind the backs of their conversational partners, and sometimes, when they were alone, they would start an argument with someone invisible… Ivan Sheglov, the chief power engineer at the plant, wants to figure out what’s going on. Finally, rumors reach him that all the suicides had recently been watching some strange film…