SPUTNIK
Directed by Egor Abramenko
Certificate: 15
☆☆☆☆

A SLITHERING creature with a taste for human brains would not be your first choice as a housemate.

Sputnik, a cleverly shot and realised horror, uses our inherent distaste for parasites as a starting point for a chilling journey into the Soviet Union.

The outset is the cockpit of a spacecraft, bringing cosmonauts home after a tour on a space station, and as they discuss what domestic niceties they will enjoy after touchdown, a seemingly straightforward descent goes horribly wrong.

Something, it seems, has tagged a lift with them, and it doesn’t end nicely for the space adventurers.

Surviving cosmonaut Konstantin (Pyotr Fyodorov) is rushed to a medical facility but seems pretty much unscathed – until doctors discover that he is completely oblivious to a creature who has decided the spaceman’s torso makes a warm and comfortable home.

It transpires that Konstantin has unknowingly brought a visitor with him – and the creature, which lives in his stomach and throat, only emerges at night.

We meet psychiatrist Tatyana (Oksana Akinshina) as she is placed in front of a disciplinary tribunal: we learn she dealt with a teenage patient suffering from anxiety by holding their head underwater – a process she points out worked.

While her approach is not welcomed by the hospital she works in, it brings her to the attention of shady Red Army-type Colonel Semiradov (Fedor Bondarchuk).

He asks her to come to a top-secret base, where they have a patient who could do with some help.

Tatyana arrives at the spooky complex to investigate how the human/alien relationship works, and if the cosmonaut host can somehow be saved.

Egor Abramenko has built a brilliantly creepy vision of how the Soviet Union looked and felt. It is packed with interesting Soviet Modernism, which offers an extra element to the drama.

It also does a nice line in 1980s tech – from the space capsule to the laboratory holding the man/alien combo, the interiors will make you thirst to press a button, pull a lever or flick a switch.

Sputnik draws inspiration from Alien – and it is to its credit that it doesn’t feel like a poor relation.

The fact that in space, no one can hear you scream also applies to prison cells in the Russian outback.