A middle-aged German man named Thomas receives a telegram from his old Russian friend Vasily, who asks him to come to St. Petersburg for a mysterious event. Thomas spent a year there during the break-up of the Soviet Union with Vasily, his now-wife Jutta, and their gang of rebels making trouble. Now, he reflects on that time fondly as he travels to Russia via train and sees other college students having fun at night.

When he gets off at the St. Petersburg station he decides to wander in search of Vasily, but before he can go any further he’s confronted with a bear. To his shock no one else seems to pay much attention to it, and the bear itself doesn’t display any aggression. Thomas continues on to a cafe where he sits and watches people go by for a bit until he sees yet another bear approach a woman and tap her on the shoulder. Shocked, he follows the bear until it boards a bus, and then resolves to find Vasily by returning to their old haunt.

Thomas follows signs that say “Freedom is Space for the Spirit” to the old building their collective used to stay in, which is now thoroughly abandoned. On one of the doors he finds a newspaper article about the bears, which appeared a few weeks ago and don’t have mouths, and decides to visit the newspaper office to see if they have any information about Vasily. When he gets there, the other writers seem upset at his inquiry and he starts to leave. Just before he does, he’s stopped by a woman named Ana, Vasily’s niece. She tells him that she thinks he had something to do with the bears and disappearance of her friend Alyosha, but hasn’t seen her uncle since the bears came. She gives Thomas a piece of paper that reminds him of a time he and Vasily stumbled upon a cage with two malnourished gorillas in it in a forest, and they decide to head there.

When they get to the cage, Vasily appears and runs down towards them, shutting himself inside. He invites them in, grinning, but they do not enter. Ana demands to know the location of Alyosha, who was one of his students. He tells them about his years-long trip to Siberia, where he studied with shamans and learned how to transform people into bears. He decided to turn his willing students into bears as a form of artistic political commentary, but something went wrong with his spell because the bears have no mouths and are starving to death.

Alyosha was one of the transformed students. They watch the bears congregate on Trinity Bridge on Vasily’s tracker, and Ana and Thomas rush to meet them there. As they watch, the bears begin to stand and attempt to roar at the sky. When they’re done, they all fall off the bridge and into the water to die.

Ana runs away and Thomas, in desperate need of comfort, calls his wife to speak to his unborn son as he heads back to take the next train home.