What if the only survivor of a failed space mission did not come back alone? Sputnik, Egor Abramenko's Russian sci-fi horror from 2020, takes that question into a sealed military facility and watches a psychologist, a cosmonaut and their handlers circle the answer.
What is Sputnik about?
A Soviet spacecraft returns from orbit at the height of the Cold War and comes down hard, its mission wrecked, its commander the sole man left alive. He is placed under guard and observation rather than celebrated, and a psychologist with a reputation for unorthodox methods is brought in to judge whether he is fit, truthful, or even entirely himself. Her sessions turn up gaps in his memory and a physical pattern that no debrief can explain, and the officers running the base seem far less surprised than she is. The further she pushes, the clearer it becomes that the real subject of the facility is not the man's mind but whatever travelled back to Earth inside him, and that the people in charge have their own plans for it.
About the cast
Oksana Akinshina plays the psychologist whose arrival sets the story in motion, and Pyotr Fyodorov is the cosmonaut under observation; the film rests on the wary exchanges between the two of them. Fyodor Bondarchuk, Anton Vasilyev and Pavel Ustinov take the remaining principal roles among the military and scientific staff who control the base and ration what she is allowed to know.
Context & significance
Sputnik is a Russian production directed by Egor Abramenko, running 113 minutes and tagged as drama, horror, sci-fi and thriller, which is an accurate map of how it moves: a slow institutional drama in its first act, a creature film by its middle, and a chase to the finish. The Cold War setting is used for atmosphere and for the moral weight of a state that treats a returning hero as a specimen, rather than for political argument. The design of the facility, all concrete corridors and observation glass, does much of the work of keeping the tension high between the night-time sequences the horror audience has come for. For viewers who like their science fiction grounded in character and procedure rather than spectacle, it is a tightly built example of the form.
Watching Sputnik on Ktime
Sputnik is available on K-Time with a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so you can follow the Russian-language original with Farsi text or switch to the dubbed track. Playback needs a K-Time account login, while this page is free to read. The service is designed for Persian speakers, with a Farsi interface throughout and a catalogue that mixes Iranian titles with dubbed and subtitled international films like this one.