Mute Witness
Moscow, 1993. In an old cinema studio building, an American producer is filming a low budget slasher film. The director, Andy Clark (Evan Richards), is working with his girlfriend, Karen Hughes (Fay Ripley), as his assistant, and his girlfriend's sister, Billy Hughes (Marina Zudina), as his FX make-up artist. Billy is a very pretty young blonde girl, but she doesn't have the physical ability to speak, not even to utter the merest sound. But she isn't deaf.Beside those three, all the rest of the crew is Russian. Among them, Lyosha (Sergei Karlenkov), the young and handsome assistant cameraman, is trying to flirt with Billy, under the amused eye of his friend Arkadi (Igor Volkov), one the light engineers. All the cast is also Russian. One of the female actress, who is supposed to have been stabbed to death, is overacting her part and breaks several props on the set. It is almost closing time in the studio, and there is no time to fix the props, so Andy decides it is time to go home.On the parking lot, Andy and Karen reminds Billy she is invited for dinner in their apartment. Then Billy remembers she forgot to take a mask she has to fix, and goes back in the building, while all the other cars are leaving.Back in her workshop, Billy doesn't find her mask, but, through her window, sees the janitor (Nikolai Pastukhov) ready to close and lock the main gate of the compound. She hits the bars of the window to attract his attention, but doesn't succeed. She rushes downstairs, only to find the doors of the building already locked. Billy telephones her sister. She can communicate with her sister by tapping on the microphone of the handset. Billy tells her what happened. After she hung up, Billy rushes downstairs, because she heard some voices coming from one of the sets.Without being noticed, she enters the set, where Lyosha is filming a porn movie. A plump naked blonde woman is having sex with a half-dressed man wearing a mask. Billy is both slightly embarrassed and amused. But she stops being amused when the masked man pulls a huge knife and starts stabbing the woman, and eventually kills her. The two men are making what is called a «snuff movie», which is a movie where people are really killed. In the underground world, such movies are supposed to be sold to very rich people for a very high price.Billy starts running out of the set, but she knocks a hatstand down, sending a diskette under a wooden wardrobe. Lyosha, who heard the noise made by the falling hatstand, starts running after Billy. Billy hides behind a vending machine in a long corridor. While Lyosha is searching one the rooms that opens on the corridor, Billy steals the key of the emergency door at the end of the corridor. But she doesn't have time to open the emergency door, because Lyosha is back in the corridor. Billy hides in one of the rooms opening on the corridor.Going from room to room, she reaches an out-of-order elevator and starts climbing down the shaft of the elevator using the emergency ladder. Meanwhile Arkadi meets his friend Lyosha in the corridor. We then understand that Arkadi is the masked man who killed the poor woman.Billy has the key to the emergency door between her teeth but she drops it. It falls down into the cabin, at the bottom of the shaft. Billy climbs down the shaft and looks inside the cabin through the chicken wire on the roof. She sees that the cabin door is wide open, and that the key is not inside the cabin, but just outside near the door, on the landing of the basement level. Arkadi and Lyosha walk in, carrying large plastic bags, which they push under the cabin into the bottom of the shaft. The key drops with the bags.When they are gone, Billy goes under the cabin to find her key. She not only finds her key, but also discovers that, inside the bags, are the remains of the poor murdered woman. She starts running back toward the emergency door, but she is spotted by Lyosha and Arkadi. Nevertheless, she reaches the emergency door, which she opens.But, before she can lock it back, Lyosha violently pushes it open and Billy falls from the outside emergency gallery down onto a huge pile of used film boxes.Before Lyosha can kill Billy, Karen, Andy and the janitor find her. While Andy and the janitor go get a doctor, Lyosha holds Billy's hands to prevent her explaining what happened to her sister. He pretends she mustn't move or she could get paralyzed.Slightly later, inside the set where the woman was murdered, two uniformed policemen are questioning Billy with Karen's help. But Lyosha and Arkadi explain to the policemen it was a «fake murder», and show them a fake prop knife with a retractable blade and a pouch of fake blood attached to it. They even give one of their films to the policemen. Then they all go down in the basement to look at the plastic bag in the bottom of the elevator shaft. But there is nothing but rubbish in the bags, and Billy, Karen, Andy and the two policemen leave the studio.Patrolling the basement, the janitor finds a skull burning in the incinerator, but he is killed by Arkadi. Meanwhile, Karen, Andy and Billy are eating in a restaurant. And Karen still believes her sister is telling the truth, even against all the «proofs» that were given to her.In the yard of the studio compound, Lyosha and Arkadi are waiting for their Big Boss, called «The Reaper» (Sir Alec Guiness), who comes in a black limousine, surrounded by other cars, full of his bodyguards. The Reaper tells them they won't get paid until they kill Billy.Andy, whose father is a high level politician, calls the US ambassador's secretary, Mr Lovett (Stephen Bouser), who immediately meets Alexander Larsen (Oleg Yankovsky), a high-rank police officer, who is acting as an undercover detective to track the activities of the criminal organization led by The Reaper.Meanwhile, Billy is back in her apartment, where she can communicate with her sister through a computer which translates what she types into synthetic spoken language.Meanwhile, Larsen and Lovett are watching the film that was given to the policemen by Arkadi and Lyosha. Actually, it is not the snuff movie made by Lyosha, but the movie made by Andy, in which the stupid actress is breaking half of the set. Later in the night, Lovett calls Andy to give him «the good news».Before going to bed, Karen calls her sister to check that she is okay. While they are speaking, someone rings the doorbell in Billy's apartment. It is Arkadi who tries to get in Billy's apartment, but she succeeds in slamming the door in his face. Unfortunately, Arkadi starts unscrewing the lock of the door with a power drill.When she heard the noise, Karen immediately took the decision to go to her sister's place, so Billy can't call her back. Billy tries to call the police through the operator, but the operator doesn't understand what the synthetic voice machine says. When she eventually gets someone who speaks good English, Arkadi has succeeded in entering Billy's apartment, and he tears the telephone cord off. Billy has taken a big knife from her kitchen and she tries to keep Arkadi away from her. They fight all around the apartment, breaking things, and eventually Billy crashes a big vase on Arkadi's head.Billy locks herself in the bathroom while Lyosha walks in her apartment. Arkadi tries to smash the bathroom door open, and when he eventually succeeds, it is to fall into the bathtub full of water. Billy throws the electric hair-drier in the bathtub and Arkadi dies from electrocution.She tries to rush out of her apartment, but Lyosha catches her. He wants her to tell him where is an important diskette he is looking for (Actually, it is the diskette we saw going under the big wardrobe, when Billy knocked the hatstand down on the set). He gives a pen to Billy to write it down, but she drives the pen violently into Lyosha's leg. But, before he can do anything back to Billy, he is knocked out by Larsen, who takes rapidly Billy out of the apartment, and into his car. Larsen's car is followed by Wartschuk's car. Wartschuk (Alexander Piatov) is The Reaper's right-hand man, the only one of his assistants he really trusts.Very shortly after Larsen and Billy's departure, Karen and Andy enter the apartment. They find the apartment trashed and Arkadi's corpse in the bathtub. Afraid of Lyosha, they lock themselves in one of the bedroom. Two fake policemen, sent by Wartschuk, walk into the apartment, kill Lyosha, take Andy and Karen out of the locked bedroom, and start asking them about the missing diskette;Meanwhile, in his car, Larsen explains to Billy that the missing diskette contains very important data about The Reaper's criminal organization. Billy suddenly remembers where the diskette is, but when she hears Larsen talking in Russian to Wartschuk into a walkie-talkie, she gets suspicious about him. To force him to stop the car, she hits him in his private parts and then ties his hand on the steering-wheel with the handcuffs she found in the glove compartment. She gets out of the car, and starts running toward Wartschuk's car. But she hesitates, stops and comes back into Larsen's car, who drives away just before Wartschuk's henchman catches her.Meanwhile, the two fake policemen are still trying to get Andy and Karen to tell them about the missing diskette. One of the policemen puts his gun on Andy's head, but, very discreetly, Karen pulls the rug from under his feet, The policeman falls down and inadvertently shoots his gun and kills his colleague. Then Karen knocks the fallen policeman out by hitting him on the head with the telephone handset, then finishes him by crashing an armchair on his head.Meanwhile, Larsen and Billy have reached the studio building. Billy frees Larsen and they walk inside the building, and lock the doors from the inside. Outside the building, Wartschuk parks on the yard surrounded by other cars full of gunmen. Andy and Karen park in the street near the compound and enters it by going over the wall.Inside the building, Larsen finds the diskette under the wardrobe, but Wartschuk walks in and Larsen, playing his part as an undercover agent, first pretends to be on Wartschuk's side against Billy, but then hits Wartschuk on the head with the butt of his gun.Meanwhile, Andy and Karen succeeds in entering the building, but before going in, they see The Reaper's car driving in the compound. Once inside, they see Larsen bringing Billy out of the building at gunpoint. The Reaper orders Larsen to shoot her, which he does. Billy falls on the ground, covered with blood. Satisfied, The Reaper orders all his gunmen to drive out of the compound.When Larsen walks back inside the building, Karen punches him very hard and then walks out to her dead sister, only to find out she is NOT dead and has only used one of her FX gadgets to pretend she was shot and covered with fake blood. Inside the building, Andy tries to shoot Larsen with Larsen's gun, only to discover it is loaded with blank cartridges.Larsen and Andy walk out to meet Billy, and we understand that Billy has fallen in love with Larsen. Larsen puts Wartschuk, gagged and all tied up, in his car. But something in Wartschuk's frightened expression worries Billy, who, not been able to talk, reads faces better than other people. She makes Larsen come out of the car, just before the car explodes, killing Wartschuk, but not Larsen.
cult, comedy, murder, violence, flashback