The world looks on with baited breath as Russia announced this week that a vaccine developed to combat the Covid-19 virus is ready for use – despite only two months testing on humans.

The announcement has echoes of the 1950s Space Race during the Cold War – when the USSR launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, in 1957, and sent a man into space four years later. Russia appears to have gained an early lead in the global race to battle the Covid-19 epidemic, by launching their new Sputnik vaccine way ahead of any other country.

Coincidentally, the vaccine – called ‘Sputnik V’ – has been revealed in the same week the terrifying Russian sci-fi horror film SPUTNIK is released on digital platforms in the UK.

In the chilling, prescient film, that has alarming parallels with what is happening in the real world, emergency testing is undertaken in a top secret government facility in Russia, on a man stricken with a debilitating condition. It’s a race against time to find a method of containment for this new and unknown virus.

Is it a benign force that will benefit the planet? Or should further testing be done, before exposing humanity to its effects? The same questions are being asked of Russia’s Sputnik as we speak…

So the choice is really down to the public. Try out an unverified vaccine that the World Health Organisation has yet to approve, or settle back to watch a sci-fi chiller that Flickering Myth calls “a vicious treat”, with, according to Starburst, “slick directing and gorgeous cinematography”?

At the height of the Cold War, a Soviet spacecraft crash lands after a mission gone awry, leaving the commanding astronaut as its only survivor. After a renowned Russian psychologist is brought in to evaluate the astronaut’s mental state, it becomes clear that something dangerous may have come back to Earth with him.