36 | New Scientist | 19 February 2022
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The film column
From Russia with flu A surreal and sometimes exhausting journey through
one man’s delirium provides an ambitious and mischievous take on history,
aliens and the human mind, finds Simon IngsSE
RGEY
PONOMARE
V/SOVER
EIGN^ FILMSPetrov’s Flu is an
ode to Russian sci-fi
and absurdist artFilm
Petrov’s Flu
Kirill Serebrennikov
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Set in an hallucinatory,
“metaversal” future, this
film stars Christoph Waltz
as a computer scientist hired
to prove that humanity’s
work amounts to nothing.PETROV (Semyon Serzin) is riding
a trolleybus home across the
snowbound city of Yekaterinburg
when a fellow passenger mutters
that the rich deserve to be shot.
Seconds later, the bus stops, Petrov
is pulled onto the street and a rifle
is pressed into his hands. Street
executions follow. Then, he is back
on the bus and it is unclear how
much of that actually happened.
Petrov’s Flu is an ambitious,
mischievous film, one that is rich
in allusions to Russian history,
literature and cinema. It is also a
painfully precise, gut-wrenching
depiction of what it is like to run
a high fever. Seeing everything
from Petrov’s sick, disjointed
point of view, we find the real
world sliding away again and
again, often into violent absurdity.
Petrov’s fever gradually breaks
over the course of the film, but it is
a while before we can be confident
about what is real and what isn’t:
whether his friend, the drunken
mischief-maker Igor (Yuri
Kolokolnikov), is real and whether
Sergey (Ivan Dorn), the struggling
writer who browbeats poor
Petrov on every point, is a figmentof Petrov’s febrile imagination.
At the start, Petrov’s Flu is very
much a sci-fi movie. The city is
languishing under an epidemic
that arrived accompanied by
lights in the sky; Petrova (Chulpan
Khamatova), Petrov’s estranged
wife, is possessed by a demonic
alien force during a library poetryreading; UFO-themed street
graffiti comes to life and wiggles
across the screen.
As reality and hallucination
part company, however, it becomes
something different: a film about
parents and children; about
creative work, pretension and
ambition; and also, strongly, about
Russia’s love of science fiction.
At its birth, Western science
fiction, and especially US science
fiction, celebrated adventure and
exploration. Russian sci-fi has
always been more about findingand building homes in a
hostile environment. It is
also strongly religious in
spirit, and was indeed for many
years one of Russia’s very few
outlets for spiritual expression.
The aliens in Russian science
fiction invariably offer some
form of redemption to a struggling
humanity, and Petrov’s Flu is
no exception. One of the most
affecting scenes in the film is
when Petrov, overcome with
fear, dashes with his son to a
local hospital, only for the pair
to be intercepted by a kindly UFO.
Such are Petrov’s fever
dreams, coloured by his space-
loving childhood and his adult
career drawing comic books.
At one point, he remembers
his mum and dad decorating a
Christmas tree with festive plastic
astronauts; at another, Petrova
goes on a murderous rampage
among the climbing-frame
rockets and spaceships of
a dilapidated playground.
Fans of Andrei Tarkovsky,
director of 1970s science-fiction
classics Solaris and Stalker, will
enjoy the nods to key moments
in those films. But it would be
a mistake, I think, to watch this
film for the sci-fi in-jokes. True,
Petrov’s Flu is a shocking and funny
contribution to Russia’s centuries-
old tradition of absurdist art. But
it is also a film about people, not
to mention an extraordinary
evocation of febrile delirium
and its assault on the mind.
In the end, as fantasy and reality
separate, what might have seemed
to be a disconnected bag of bits
(some tender, some shocking, all
horribly entertaining) turns out
to be a puzzle that, once complete,
leaves us exhausted but satisfied. ❚Simon Ings is a novelist and
science writer. Follow him on
Instagram at @simon_ings“ Petrov’s fever gradually
breaks, but it is a while
before we can be
confident about what
is real and what isn’t”