A devastating phenomenological portrait of the existential marginality of Elya, a black widow due to her addictions, who frequently, if not easily, finds herself welcoming a string of drug addicts into her home every day, whom she invites or sells Crocodiles, heroin and opium to, while also injecting herself. But when they gradually die, such as Olya the Doll, she drags the corpses to the stairs and courtyard of the building where they live, with the help of Kostya, her husband or father of her son Zhenkya, as if the bodies were rubbish to be collected by the waste collection system in the morning. The black widow has an accomplice, it is not clear whether from the police or where, who warns her that they will no longer be able to dispose of the corpses wholesale as she does. That she must stop now. When Kostya returns home to play with his injured son, who has been beaten and has one eye blackened, the widow curses them both and asks her husband if he feels like a child playing with Zhenkya. She then insults him for not bringing any money home, while she receives more junkies, some of whom cut off their genitals or other sensitive areas in order to get drugs. For a while, they leave where they live and go to the grandmother’s house, but only because Elua remembers that the old woman has a fortune in gold. It is unclear whether he kills the grandmother or whether she simply suffers, as the voiceover says, a stroke. In any case, with the old woman’s body in bed, he searches until he finds valuable jewellery and gold chains. Not only is he unable to avoid his addictions, he also has no qualms about injecting himself in front of his own son, and the scenes go from painful to truly raw. When they leave the old woman’s body there, they are suddenly attacked by two men who apparently came to get drugs but beat Elya and Kostya to get the money from the sales and rob them.

One of the last misfits to arrive at Elya and Kostya’s house is Nastya, who is offered drugs but is insulted and sent out every day to steal or prostitute herself or whatever it takes to bring fresh money home for more drugs. The problem, towards the end of the film, is that while the widow brings out ‘her reserve of murky solution’ in front of guests. There’s an old woman with a scythe at the door!” The last straw is Nastya in the bathroom, covered in blood. The widow bids a tearful farewell to her son, and Beethoven’s transfigured opening refrain from Clair de Lune returns for the final minutes, so distorted by Elya’s own interpretation that it sounds more like a wake or a morgue.