Film Review: ‘Sputnik’ is better red than dead

A feast for hypochondriacs, Sputnik asks the question, “What if that tickle in the back of your throat is actually a parasitic alien life-form that slithers out your esophagus while you’re asleep in order to eat every living thing it comes into contact with?” In 2020 a timely query, when every night brings with it the rock firm belief that cough cough this, this is the day that The Disease managed to get itself locked down inside of you, no matter what precautions you took. Masks be damned there’s no stopping squick.

What Veshnyakov (Pyotr Fyodorov) and Averchenko (Aleksey Demidov) did was in the year of our lord 1983 venture into outer space on their little rocket cruiser at the bidding of the blessed Mother Russia, and before one of them could finish humming his favorite little tune a slithery little somebody came a tap tap tappin, rap rap rappin, on their window-pane. Cut to the rocket crash-landing back to earth, Averchenko tossed to the side with his skull bashed in. But Veshnyakov, crafty devil, is somehow seemingly fine, no worse for wear… in fact he is suddenly getting stronger and faster by the day… although he does seem to have a mysterious little tickle…

I see a lot of people comparing Egor Abramenko’s sci-fi thriller — a huge hit in its native Russia that’s out here in the US this weekend via VOD thanks to IFC — to Ridley Scott’s Alien and sure, I get that, especially when it comes to its no-nonsense science-spouting jumpsuit-wearing leading-lady. Tatyana (Oksana Akinshina), a psychologist brought in to see what’s what with Veshnyakov, is clearly a riff on our beloved bitch-puncher Ellen Ripley as she kicks alien ass and says all the right, smart, capable stuff.

Continue reading over at MNPP…

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Jason Adams

Jason knew the movies were his bag the second he saw that lawyer sitting on a toilet getting eaten by a Tyrannosaur, and he's never looked back once since. Simultaneously a movie snob who watches Fassbinder for fun while also being a trash apologist prone to reenacting the death scenes in the Friday the 13th series through vivid pantomime, he's got room for everything projected onto a big screen in his big roomy heart. He's been covering the daily beat on his site My New Plaid Pants since 2005 and is a regular contributor to The Film Experience. He's a member of GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics, and has been accredited to cover basically every New York City based film festival for the past ten years including NYFF and Tribeca. You can follow him on Twitter at @JAMNPP

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