Sputnik

Sputnik is a 2020 Russian science-fiction horror film directed by Egor Abramenko in his feature directorial debut. It stars Oksana Akinshina as a young doctor who is recruited by the Soviet military to assess a cosmonaut who survived a mysterious space accident and returned to Earth with a dangerous organism living inside him. Alongside Akinshina, the film's cast includes Pyotr Fyodorov and Fyodor Bondarchuk. Sputnik was scheduled to have its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2020 prior to the festival being postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The film was released on video-on-demand in Russia on April 23, 2020. It received generally positive reviews from critics. Plot In 1983, during the last hot period of the Cold War, two Russian cosmonauts engaged in an orbital research mission experienced something inexplicable while returning to Earth: they see something moving outside their ship. The spacecraft malfunctions on re-entry and crashes in Kazakhstan, and only one of the cosmonauts, Konstantin, survives. He is taken to an isolated military facility, where Dr. Tatyana Klimova, a young psychiatrist under review for her controversial methods in psychiatry, is brought in, recruited by the officer in charge, Colonel Semiradov. She is not told the real reason for Konstantin's quarantine, but she soon discovers that the cosmonaut brought back an extraterrestrial life-form inside his own body without knowing it himself. The creature comes out during the night, while its host is asleep. Colonel Semiradov reveals to her that she is here to determine how to separate Konstantin and the creature, since they seem to have developed a completely symbiotic relationship, with the creature living in the esophagus of the cosmonaut and benefiting from his nutrients, while Konstantin has made an impossible recovery from his injuries received after the crash-landing. Tatyana confronts Konstantin by telling him she knows he has a child whom he has abandoned at an orphanage, implying he is not a national hero but a coward who does not care about his son, with the purpose of stressing him. Thanks to this, she discovers that the creature is affected by hormone levels and that one of the videos she has been shown has been altered, which leads to her discovering a horrifying truth: the creature does not feed from whatever Konstantin eats, but rather eats live humans, and that Semiradov has been feeding it prisoners.