In Siberia's Taiga forest, a former traffic policeman named Sergei Torop has rebuilt himself as Vissarion, leader of the Church of the Last Testament and known to his roughly 4,000 followers simply as "the Teacher." He looks the part, deliberately, with the robes and beard of religious paintings of Christ, and he preaches that a Great Flood is coming and that only those who join his community on a mountain in Krasnoyarsk will survive it. The film moves through that settlement, watching daily rituals and gatherings that start out looking like ordinary rural cooperative life before the group's convictions about UFOs and the world's imminent end come into focus. A former member supplies the inside view, describing what pulled people in and what it cost the families left behind when relatives left ordinary jobs and cities to follow Vissarion into the forest. The film treats the community's calm, functional surface and its apocalyptic core as the same story, not two.