In Sputnik, director Egor Abramenko’s feature debut, the creature comes out at night. It emerges—nearly translucent, crawling on four slender arms and upright but for its mermaid-like tail—from the body of a Russian cosmonaut. Konstantin (Pyotr Fyodorov), the guy in question, is apparently unaware of the odd new goings-on in his body. He doesn’t remember crash-landing back on Earth, nor is he certain of the fate of a fellow traveler who ought to have been with him in space.
What he knows is that something is amiss—because from the start of Sputnik, he is practically being held captive, subject to a strange array of ineffective tests. Ineffective, that is, until they call in the big dogs: Tatyana Yuryevna Klimova (Oksana Akinshina), a neurophysiologist whose appeal for this particular project is that she’s willing to use unconventional… some would say irresponsible… methods to save her patients.
And so begins a sometimes-riveting but mostly familiar foray into the friendly terrains of alien monsters and Soviet secrets. The villain, even when he’s pretending not to be one, isn’t the extraterrestrial, but one Colonel Semiradov (Fyodor Bondarchuk)—who, it probably goes without saying, has secrets of his own, methods and intentions that he didn’t exactly expound upon when offering Klimova this odd, terrifying new job.
And the slow reveal of those secrets—which ultimately amount to the usual ways people lie to each other with glory and, this being Soviet Russia, world power in mind—are maybe the best part of Sputnik. That—and the mystery of the creature itself, which is something of a swerve from our usual creatures from space. Yes, it has chosen a heroic cosmonaut as its host—a choice that feels less arbitrary as the scientists’ research wears on. And yes, it has a nasty habit of killing people, drumming up their fear before snapping their necks and slurping up the good stuff.
But whether it’s a parasite or a symbiote is subject to question, as is Konstantin’s awareness. And the ways Abramenko and his cast wend their way through these questions, buttressed on all sides by the genre’s more familiar thrills and Soviet-stereotype power plays, is what makes the movie work. This is altogether well-made, straightforward entertainment, gross but contained, intriguingly structured: a movie as slickly designed as the slime trailing the alien’s mermaid butt.
Appropriately, the movie did gangbusters streaming in Russia back in April. It is very watchable. Abramenko’s script is almost too tight to make room for any real sense of shock or revelation, things it’s appropriate to crave that from a movie in which an alien is curled up in the belly of a national hero and even seems to manifest some of his personality.
The movie doesn’t dwell nearly enough in the surreality of its premise, doesn’t quite milk it all for what it’s worth. But then, at times, Sputnik surprises you. In its best sequence—a yummy, violent one—Klimova covertly witnesses the dark underside of this operation. The movie broadens, thematically, to readdress some of her own reckless strategies, and the broader question of just how far a scientist should be willing to go. I won’t pretend Sputnik goes nearly as far with this, the cruel danger of experimentation, as it could; on the other hand, Abramenko’s isn’t a style that seems sympatico with genuine moral hand-wringing, so it’s probably better for us all that he avoided it. His movie sets up a few good questions—and for awhile it really got my mind going—only to resolve itself in the usual drab violence. This is all to be expected. The movie may be about an alien, but its flaws are human, very human.
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