I love how it leads in into his change into a woman (or rather cross dresser) following the folk tale of cheating death by becoming somebody else. Fantastic.

And then it all goes to total abyss of failure. The movie spins into a mute hate filled display of how the local people (including his family) are all hating on him for doing this, and there is 0 communication from anyone as to reasons, or in fact, no talk at all. Just him... going about and getting mistreated by everybody. It becomes a different movie and throws everything away that has been previously set. It could have been done so much better and still portray that anti gay russian sentiment (which is what this movie was actually about),but they opted for a hurried up shock value approach. Speaking of shock value, it has none because everything is predictable, cliched, lacking emotion.. you just DONT CARE. They destroyed his character to the point you just don't care.

The ending is ambiguous at best. It suggest his trick worked, or rather, that he was misdiagnosed; we will never know. And then if that is so, it infers he likes what he was doing and came out, or became a drag queen from now on. Russian cinema is still suffering from its inability of using dialogue to convey a story. This has been true since the 70s when that silent expose movement took over there and they still cannot get rid of it.

This gets a 5 because the start is great and it just turns into garbage.

I had high hopes for this. But alas, hopes were dashed.

"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.