Note : The title, based on contemporary Russian slang for "idiot" (derived from "Down’s Syndrome") and English "house" or "house music," can be interpreted as "insane asylum" or "music for idiots."
Plot synopsis
"<...>Placing their film in post-Soviet Moscow, Kachanov and Okhlobystin have updated the major characters and actions of Dostoevsky’s novel, while systematically travestying its serious religious and political themes with great doses of absurdism and crude physiological humor. Prince Myshkin (Fedor Bondarchuk), a computer programmer and lover of "house music," returns to his "historic homeland" after being "almost completely cured of a series of nervous illnesses" in the Swiss sanatorium of Dr. Schneider. He falls in with Rogozhin (Ivan Okhlobystin), a pistol-packing new Russian millionaire, a former komsomolka and femme fatale, Nastasya Filippovna (Anna Bulovskaia), the Ivolgins, Epanchins, and other minor characters familiar from the novel. Nastasya Filippovna must choose between three suitors, Ganya, Myshkin, and Rogozhin, while Myshkin is caught in a triangle of his own between Nastasya Filippovna and Aglaya Epanshina. The film concludes with Rogozhin’s murder of Nastasya Filipovna and the Prince’s relapse into madness. <...>
Anthony Anemone, KinoKultura