Sputnik (2020)
I understand why Sputnik is held up to Ridley Scott’s Alien, but I think the comparison does Sputnik a deep disservice. Sputnik—like Alien—is smart, scary, and self-contained, and like its predecessor, deals partly in themes of bodily autonomy in the face of forces that value human beings only so long as they can be used as vehicles to further those forces’ ends. The similarities end there.
Alien’s interpretations are many (class warfare, shitty workplaces, fear of rape, and so on) but they all take one economic system for granted: capitalism. Sputnik is set in Soviet Russia in 1983. It might as well be galaxies away from Alien’s perspective. Economics and American(/British) feminism have nothing to do with it. Sputnik’s more concerned with ideas about heroism, duty, and identity.
Tatiana (Oksana Akinshina) is a psychologist who resorts to unconventional methods to get results. When she loses her job after going too far with a young patient, she’s recruited by the military to evaluate Konstantin (Pyotr Fyodorov), a cosmonaut who survived a crash landing after a successful mission and came back…wrong. Konstantin is supposed to be a national hero; instead, he’s kept as a prisoner in a facility on the Kazakh steppes. In order to help him, Tatiana is forced to navigate a working relationship with an uncooperative Konstantin, with military personnel, and with hostile colleagues.
It is a relief to watch a horror movie about intelligent people who each want very different things. It is a joy to watch those intelligent people work with and against each other, and to understand why their loyalties have shifted, and how far they can stretch before they break. Sputnik does this work elegantly: no breath wasted in exposition, no shots wasted when only one will do. It helps that the cinematography is as sparse as the film’s location: all color is graded to blue-gray with flashes of red for passion and emphasis. The monster that has unjustly earned Sputnik’s comparisons to Alien is also a work of art: uncanny enough to be unsettling, and believable enough to be scary. The film does effective body horror—although, as with much body horror, it’s best not to think about the limitations for too long—but the movie is also smart enough not to let go of the human cost of the story. As the body count mounts, each character must evaluate their own limits and loyalties. I just wish I could have spent more time with each of them.
