On TV a new reality show, "Pionerlager", has started. Following the results of a casting, five young men and five girls, led by young TV presenter Alice Ten, go to the thrown pioneer camp. The rules state that every week someone would be eliminated from the show. The last one remaining will win the main prize: one million roubles. But suddenly game rules change: the invisible observer declares that it is life, not money, that will be the award for the winner. The maniac hiding behind the mask of a horse, begins a hunt for the participants. Children's horror stories which he once listened to in pioneer camp, revive and become a plot of its own murders.

Based on the novel by Booker Prize Winner Ludmila Ulitskaya, The Funeral Party is set in August 1991. In a sweltering New York City apartment, a group of Russian émigrés gathers round the deathbed of an artist named Alik, a charismatic character beloved by them all, especially the women who take turns nursing him as he fades from this world. Their reminiscences of the dying man and of their lives in Russia are punctuated by debates and squabbles: Whom did Alik love most? Should he be baptized before he dies, as his alcoholic wife, Nina, desperately wishes, or be reconciled to the faith of his birth by a rabbi who happens to be on hand? And what will be the meaning for them of the Yeltsin putsch, which is happening across the world in their long-lost Moscow but also right before their eyes on CNN?