Synopsis
A day in the life of a comic book artist and his family in post-Soviet Russia. While suffering from the flu, Petrov is carried by his friend Igor on a long walk, drifting in and out of fantasy and reality.
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Cast
- Semen SerzinPetrov-sr.
- Chulpan KhamatovaNurlynisa Petrova
- Yulia PeresildMarina
- Yuri KolokolnikovIgor
- Yuriy BorisovSasha/Ded Moroz
- Ivan DornSergey
- Aleksandr IlinViktor Mikhailovich
- Sergei Dreidenannoying old man
- Timofey TribuntsevNatalia Dmitrievna/senior citizen/militia officer/schizo
- Vladislav SemiletkovPetrov-jr.
Recommendations
- 91
The Playlist
Petrov’s Flu is fascinating partly because of the chunky muscularity – the inherent masculine brawniness – of Serebrennikov’s filmmaking, in which dreams are as solid and hard-edged as reality, and reality is a blockish, jostling thing. - 90
Variety
Through its heady stew of impulses and influences, however, Petrov’s Flu is cinema to the breathless last, riding the camera like a bucking horse as single shots carry us between locations, eras and states of mind — the thrilling, messy work of a man released. - 90
Los Angeles Times
While Serebrennikov may be banned from leaving Russia, his imagination, as well as his cast and crew, have been left gratifyingly free to roam: In its form-bending construction and surreal imagery, Petrov’s Flu plays like the work of an artist thrillingly unbound. - 83
The Film Stage
Playing out at breakneck speed, it is awash with flights of fancy: outbursts of sex and violence; aliens and murder; sepia-dripped nostalgia; jarring temporal and spatial uncertainty; homoeroticism; etc. That sense of dizziness is only further confounded by Vlad Ogai’s shifting sets and richly detailed production design, and cinematographer Vladislav Opelyants’ long roving takes. Its cast has the sense of a troupe. The frame is always packed. - 78
TheWrap
Make no mistake, Petrov’s Flu is a formidable piece of filmmaking; it is also an exercise in style that uses its own virtuoso technique as a blunt-force tool against the audience. - 70
The Hollywood Reporter
This hallucinatory, deeply confusing but skillfully executed and mesmeric work flows back and forth across time periods, parts of the city of Yekaterinburg and its characters’ memories, often literally within the space of a single shot. - 40
The Guardian
No one could doubt the technical mastery of this movie and its formal audacity. But for all that, I found something unliberating in its mercurial restlessness.
