A 75-year-old educated and witty man travels from the provinces to the capital Moscow to visit his daughter. However, she had to leave for Asia on business the evening before. The father-in-law is also an uninvited guest for her husband: he has just taken a few days off to devote himself to his dissertation in peace. The two dissimilar men hardly know each other, but spend several days exchanging ideas ... until the son-in-law finds himself alone in front of his work again after the old man's departure.
Marlen Chuciev surprises his audience with a new stylistic departure in his chamber film Epilogue, based on the story “The Father-in-Law Came” by Yuri Pachomov: he shoots in color and concentrates on the self-contained setting of a chic Moscow apartment in the 1980s. The exterior shots of city life that are so typical for Chuciev are reduced to a minimum. The reduction to a two-person play, in which two famous Russian actors shine, is also atypical. Thematically, however, Chuciev continues his legendary works of the 1960s. As the symbolically charged title suggests, the protagonists pick up on the conversation about relationships between generations in Ilych’s Gate and July Rain.
