Director Yegor Abramenko’s film has already become a hit with American film critics. On the website Rottentomatoes.com, it has 89% of positive reviews. Find out why the new Russian horror film may appeal to you as well.

1. Russian films about space are a rarity

The producers decided to shape Abramenko’s new project as a compact space horror film. Ridley Scott’s “Eighth Traveler” and John Carpenter’s “The Thing” were used as distinct sources of inspiration. Such tactics gave results like top free sex games online. Although a relatively small amount of money was invested in the film “Sputnik,” it was impeccably realized as a compelling horror film whose plot takes place practically all the time at dusk. The visual effects are interesting, but the heroes, their secrets, and mutual relations are even more interesting.

2. The horror film genre has been transformed

The action takes place in 1983 in a closed-type Soviet scientific research institute, somewhere in the steppes of Kazakhstan. The institute itself is something between the barracks and the Gulag. The institute’s employees live in ordinary workers’ homes, and in the nearby barracks, there are convicts for whom an unenviable fate was prepared according to the script. Armed soldiers guard both. All these details further intensify the horror effect. Uncertainty as a traditional element of the genre is joined by the fear of everything characteristic of a totalitarian state.

A group of scientists and soldiers led by the evil Colonel Semiradov are researching cosmonaut Vesnjakov, who has returned from space. His colleague died, and a monster from another planet lives in Vesnjakov, but the cosmonaut is not aware of that. Military personnel, understandably, are tempted to use the cosmic creature as a weapon, but for a start, it would be worth finding a common language with it. They call a doctor from Moscow, Tatjana Klimova, who was previously denied participation in the research due to stubbornness. However, with Klimova’s arrival in Kazakhstan, events begin to develop in a completely unexpected direction.

3. Artistic depiction of totalitarian noir

Since the action took place back in 1983, appropriate decorations were made for the film, and unique costumes were sewn for the heroes. The main goal of the film is not to credibly present the fashion and style of that time, but to create a kind of retro fantasy. The atmosphere of “Sputnik” is a dark space of totalitarian noir, where the corridors are filled with disturbing red light (but not as a simulator of sex online). The heroes live in small rooms filmed to provoke an attack of claustrophobia, and when the “script” breaks into the open space, it turns out that all around is an almost lifeless desert that extends to the horizon itself. In combination with other elements, it seems like an achievement that will not be another in a series of second-rate films on a worn-out topic but stands out from a bunch of other films in this genre.