Director – Egor Abramenko – 2020 – Russia – Cert. 15 – 113m
***** some of the underlying concepts and all of the special effects
** everything else
Available on VoD from Friday, August 14th. Now on Netflix
In the early 1980s a two-man Russian spacecraft undergoes a mysterious incident during its return to Earth leaving one of the crew dead. He has had half his helmet and half his head ripped off.
Survivor Konstantin Veshnyakov (Pyotr Fyodorov) is confined to a research base in the middle of nowhere for observation. Supervisor Kirill Averchenko (Aleksey Demidov) recruits psychiatrist Tatyana Klimova (Oksana Akinshina) who is in trouble for taking ethically questionable decisions concerning the life of a patient, believing that she did the right thing and saved a life. Averchenko needs someone who will do whatever it takes and damn the consequences and he would appear to have judged her correctly. Once there, however, she finds herself in conflict with chief scientist Yan Rigel (Anton Vasilev).
She quickly learns that the surviving, isolated cosmonaut is the host to an alien parasite which leaves his body at specific times of night then returns. And Konstantin, who suffered memory blackout during the return to Earth, doesn’t seem to know about the parasite.
The film is a strange mixture of plodding cliché and rare scenes of true brilliance (most of them involving special effects). Some great concepts have got bogged down in familiar ideas about soldiers and scientists in secret research facilities which rehash tired SF and horror tropes. The acting is humdrum and the art direction dull, but the worst thing is the music, ramping up drumbeats and uneasy chords in a really clumsy way to tell us parts of the movie are action-packed or scary.
It’s worth struggling through some of this run of the mill material just for the few good scenes: once we see the parasite, it’s as good as the ones in Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979), E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (Steven Spielberg, 1982) or The Arrival (David Twohy, 1996). Not only is the the design of the creature and the way in which it moves completely compelling but also its life cycle and relationship to its host have been well thought through and prove fascinating.
Alas, this doesn’t really extend to the rest of the film where some very interesting ideas aren’t really developed. For instance the surviving cosmonaut has a child (Vitaliya Kornienko) by a former relationship who is living in an orphanage in Moscow. Just as the alien leaves its host and crawls along the floor towards its prey, so the child leaves its wheelchair and crawls to a concierge’s office to retrieve the contents of a forbidden cardboard box.
If scenes where an alien attacks people and rips their heads off is your sort of thing, you’re probably the target audience and will love this. If you’re hoping for something more intelligent and cinematic beyond those scenes, you’ll likely be disappointed with the rest of the film. However there’s no denying though that the special effects, the sequences involving them and the vision underlying that element of the film are incredible.
Sputnik is out on VoD in the UK on Friday, August 14th. Now on Netflix.
Trailer: