"The Man Who Surprised Everyone" is a bold and very realistic Siberian drama by Natasha Merkulova and Aleksey Chupov. What sacrifices and what changes in life are people ready to live in a distant village and find out that he has 2 months left to live? What tests can he subject himself and those close to him? The authors of the film, directors, actors Evgeniy Tsyganov, Natalya Kudryashova and Estonian cameraman Mart Taniel, also "surprised everyone" with their brilliant work.

Saw this at fhe Film Festival Munich 2019 (in German: Film Fest München). Interesting plot, albeit a bit surreal, but it perfectly combines the attitude of the common man (m/f) towards queer behavior, on one hand, with superstition about life and death issues and incurable illnesses that may be cured nevertheless by unorthodox practices, on the other hand. This mixture offers all ingredients for unexplored avenues and unexpected developments. And it keeps us wondering all the time, against all scientific reasoning, whether our main protagonist will survive the two months allotted by his doctor.

Overall impression: Compact scenes, showing everything what had to be shown but nothing more than that. In other words: a very clever way of story telling, no frills and no distractions from the core theme. Very remarkable how we are led from A via B to C, and so on. I would hope that more film makers followed this example.

One does not need to belong to the LGBT+ community to nevertheless appreciate this story, so it can serve a broad audience. It is a fairy tale rather than showing how villagers react on queer behavior, as the latter can be predicted from very far away. Yet it is handled differently in this movie, leading to some unexpected turns of events, in addition to the obvious reactions from the crowd.

This movie is very unique. First of all the plot is incredible (at least in the beginning). I was captivated and slammed to my seat in the first half, very good cinematography and very brave scenario, everyone is long bored of. There was a few bad points especially towards the end but definitely worth watching. Also some gore content is present.

Spoiler: The second half of the movie prevented this movie from being a cult. After the initial turn of events the plot loses its dynamics towards the end. Towards the end of the movie the main characters unresponsiveness gets incredibly frustrating. I think a great opportunity was lost there. The violence climbs abruptly as the movie continues but it gets hard to understand whether this is from lack of communication or people's inner deamons.