Sputnik
Photo: Mikhail Mokrushin / IFC Films
The new Russian horror film Sputnik whips between suggested horror and schlock so fiercely that the inconsistency turns into a virtue. It’s a creepy room drama that regularly transforms into an effects-laden ick-fest. But transformation is in the DNA of the film. It begins in space, in 1983, where two Soviet cosmonauts dream about what they will do when they get home, when they get sight outside the window of their spaceship. The next thing we know, a Kazakh horse finds the wreckage of her car smothered in an empty field. One cosmonaut has a hole in his head; the other, Konstantin (Pyotr Fyodorov), is alive – but he has something else in him, as we will find out later.
Our heroine is infamous psychologist Tatyana Klimova (Oksana Akinshina), who is secretly enlisted by a hard-ass colonel (Fyodor Bondarchuk) to travel to the military base where the survivors are being held and examined. Constantine remembers nothing about what happened on his ship. He also has no idea, we soon learn that he has become the human host for a giant, gooey, slingy stranger who drives him out of his mouth every night and then crawls back. What’s more, the foreigner and the man have started to mind-report. This is why the army wants Tatyana there; they hope they can find a way to separate the man from the alien so the creature can be used for … well, the kinds of things military people always seem to want to do with mysterious intergalactic life forces.
The general setup of Sputnik is nothing particularly new. It has echoes of Stranger, en Starman, and any number of other sci-fi movies. But the tone is unusual, because director Egor Abramenko never fully reveals what kind of film he is making here; there is an uncertainty to the atmosphere of fear because we are never sure what we should be afraid of. Is it the stranger? Is it Constantine? Is it the military men? Is it the stupid, mysterious Tatyana? That uncertainty feels intentional (and completely in line with the grim, paranoid mood of the Soviet years).
Abramenko also tweaks the usual character dynamics in interesting ways. A lot of Sputnik is built around the conversations of Constantine and Tatyana, and their interaction is the best thing about the image. Everyone hides something. She has a naturally confrontational attitude towards the world, and Akinshina works wonders with the coldness of the character – it’s clear that Tatyana has buried layers of pain. Constantine, on the other hand, hides something because he remembers so little; Tatyana discovers other things from his past in an attempt to immerse himself in the mind. The psychological cat-and-mouse game between them makes the film. It also pays off beautifully in the surprisingly moving final scene, which one might call a little “twist”.
That’s the proposed horror part. But like I said, the movie is transforming. When the stranger appears, the conversation dies away and we get something direct and visceral. The VFX is not exactly seamless – the creature looks a bit too computer-generated – but even that, perhaps by accident, improves the material. There is a simplicity to the design of the creature that adds to the creepiness; it feels less like a specific monster and more like an existing fact. SputnikThe pleasures of the genre are modest, but like the best sci-fi, you get to think.
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