Hitch a Slimy, Slithering Ride with Sputnik

Where does pop culture draw a line separating genre-defining movies as either healthy or harmful for its own development? Alien, Ridley Scott’s unimpeachable 1976 masterpiece, has influenced horror and sci-fi cinema for over 30 years, from the good (Pitch Black, Galaxy of Terror), to the bad (Inseminoid), to the worst (Life). Alien, of course, remains the best example of its make and model: tactile, tense and utterly terrifying even after the umpteenth time you’ve seen Harry Dean Stanton take a set of slavering pharyngeal jaws straight to the face. The film cannot be excised from the sci-fi horror canon. It’s too good, and that in turn can make the especially egregious face-plants like Life all the more painful.
The good news is that, three years later, at least one of Alien’s descendants have figured out that borrowing from its forebear makes far more sense than lazily aping Scott, which explains in part why Egor Abramenko’s Sputnik works so well: It’s Alien-esque, because any film about governments and corporations using unsuspecting innocents as vessels for stowing extraterrestrial monsters for either weaponization or monetization can’t help evoke Alien.
Konstantin Veshnyakov (Pyotr Fyodorov) has just returned to Earth after spending an unknown amount of time floating in the stars, which would be a happy occasion if not for the abrupt crash landing. Tragically, his partner died along the way. Worse, there’s a slimy alien critter living rent-free in Konstantin’s chest cavity, though thanks to episodic amnesia he’s mercifully unaware of the uninvited houseguest. Determined to take the monster out of the man, shady commander Semiradov (Fedor Bondarchuk) calls upon Tatyana Klimova (Oksana Akinshina), an iron-spined psychiatrist on the verge of being struck off the record, to diagnose Konstanin’s condition and make the task of removing the symbiote from his body easier.
Sputnik has big ambitions riding on essentially a four-piece cast, adding in Anton Vasilev as Dr. Rigel, Klimova’s immediate rival in the undisclosed military base where the picture is set. Rigel bristles at and pushes back on Klimova’s unorthodox methods, which she interprets as him being threatened at the chance she might steal the Nobel Peace Prize from him. Because Sputnik is a Russian film about naughty Russian secrets, and because of its Alien, ancestry there’s much more going on under the surface, which Abramenko withholds and doles out judiciously over 100 or so minutes. Konstatin’s relationship with the symbiote, for instance, is a question: The creature exits his body in the wee hours every single night, and questions arise as to whether he knows he has a stowaway in his body or not. The questions have complicated answers that raise new questions. (Fittingly, the movie is structured like a matryoshka doll soaked in slobber and gore.)