Dmitry Kulitchkov, left, and Artyom Bystrov (Dima) in The Fool (Olive Films)

One of the most pessimistic, yet accurate, onscreen portrayals of modern life in quite some time, writer/director Yury Bykov’s The Fool is the best kind of morality tale, because it all but denies the very existence of morality. In the Russian town where the film transpires, it has become exceedingly rare to have a shred of decency, and being motivated by anything other than hedonism or greed is seen as an absurd weakness. The film poses the question of what to do with positive motivations in a world that actively rejects and scorns them. What should decent people do when no one understands, wants, or needs them?

Dima (Artem Bystrov), a plumber, lives with his parents, wife, and son, and studies to become an architect. He is called to a hellish “dormitory” (a large apartment building housing 800 people) to repair a burst pipe, and is aghast when he sees a crack running the height of the building, on both sides. His architectural studies have told him that a building of that height cannot sustain that level of damage very long, and he is convinced the building has only a few more days before it collapses. He has the math all figured out and is certain that the building will take all the lives of its inhabitants if they aren’t evacuated immediately. It’s just a matter of time.

But things aren’t as easy as just evacuating people from a hazardous structure. Dima has to deal with his overbearing mother (Olga Samoshina), who looks like a demonic, obese Ann Dowd. She spews scorn at her meek husband and son for not being vicious enough to have acquired more wealth and for caring only about doing moderate good for others. Every night a gang of teenagers break apart an old bench in front of their apartment building, and every night Dima’s father repairs it, since people use it and would have to sit on the frozen ground otherwise. His wife of course mocks him for this. Her husband and son are stupid, she thinks, because the proper way to behave is to extract as much value from your surroundings, by any means necessary. If only she had been able to marry a more cunning man and have had a shrewder child!

Dima eventually works up the courage to confront the local top administrators, who are all at a hall celebrating the birthday of the mayor, working themselves into a lather. The chief of police, chief of the fire department, the housing director, and more are there, and they are all fall-down drunk. You get the feeling that these people would think nothing of stepping over a dead body to grab their next shot of vodka.

The film spends a good bit of time on the actual residents of this ridiculously shabby building, and if they aren’t the worst people who have ever lived, they have got to be pretty close. When the man who is burned with the burst pipe in the film’s opening isn’t swilling vodka or scoring drugs, he’s beating his wife. The rest of the residents are pot smoking teens, hopelessly alcoholic old men, and shouting crones. These domestic scenes make it painfully clear how little they all would care if their building came down with them inside it, though they never come out and actually say it. As long as it waited until they ran out of booze or drugs, they all would admit that the building falling on them would be doing them a favor.

Despite the indifference of the residents and the machinations of the bureaucrats whose greed and laziness put these 800 souls in mortal peril, Dima foolishly presses on through it all. He’s a bright, good-looking young man with some career prospects, so why is he putting so much energy into this pursuit that is really none of his concern? Because he is so naïve.

In its simple, yet absurd premise, executed with scrupulously detailed realism, The Fool is akin to Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. It is a bit of an absurd premise that an entire structure could be so neglected because of corrupt local administrators, and that they would go to any lengths to save their own hides once the building’s impending collapse was made crystal clear. But we buy it because it is all grounded in reality.

Kafka’s story followed Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman, after he woke up as a giant insect, through his morning routine, as he tried to open a door with an insect appendage, attempted to communicate to his family and boss, along with a bunch of other daily minutia, all rendered in modest absurdity. The Fool is kind of an inversion of this, as Dima is seemingly the only person in his town who is still human—he’s surrounded by bugs.