"There's been an incident in space."
I stumbled across this film yesterday via ads showing up on my Instagram stream and it looked intriguing enough that I was willing to drop the $6.99 rental fee and check it out. While I was prepared to be disappointed, I came away pleasantly surprised. It's definitely worth rental (I watched through AppleTV, but it's also available through Amazon and numerous other sources).
Described by some as a cross between Alien and Arrival (I wouldn't go that far), Sputnik takes place in the Soviet Union in 1983 at the peak of Cold War tensions. It tells the story of the return of the Orbit-4 space mission and its crew. The landing site is horrific: the commander is dead, the flight engineer is in a coma. The third crew member,* Valery Basov, has survived but has lost his memory from the experience and cannot shed any light on the cause of the accent. In a secluded government facility, under the constant watch of armed guards, an upstart, outspoken psychologist Tatiana Kilmova is brought in to attempt to cure the astronaut's amnesia and unravel the mystery. In the process, she learns that Orbit-4 has carried back with it an alien parasite that threatens to destroy them all.
The effects and cinematography are surprisingly good. The lead actor (Pytor Fyodorov) is very easy on the eyes and reminds me tangentially of 60's heart throb Glenn Corbett. The film has the same austere, 80s-era Soviet Cold War Bureaucratic palette that was used so effectively in HBO's "Chernobyl."
The story moves quickly, and the film wastes very little time before revealing the parasite.
If you don't mind subtitles or are fluent in Russian, definitely worth your time. It's an interesting escape from the times we find ourselves in.
*I never could figure out where that third crew member was located, because in all the scenes shown on board the spacecraft before re-entry, you only see two cosmonauts.