Petrov’s Flu review – a dizzying and anarchic vision of modern Russia

Post-Soviet Russia is often characterised in cinema as a chaotic, corrupt, miserable place – at least in the small trickle of films that make it across shores to the UK. Perhaps there’s a self-selecting stereotype at play, where “good” Russian cinema is equated as grey, sodden, and serious, a point underscored by the type of Russian film that tends to make its way around the European festival circuit, and by the fact that the country’s other highly-vaunted filmmaker of the moment, Andrey Zvyagintsev, is guilty of all three adjectives.

Petrov’s Flu, Kirill Serebrennikov's first film since the end of his house arrest in 2019 (ostensibly for embezzlement but almost certainly because he’s a critic of Putin’s regime), does depict his native country as a chaotic, corrupt and miserable place, but it is anything by grey, sodden and serious. This is a rude, anarchic, and freewheeling film that launches headlong into the interior headspace of its titular character (Semyon Serzin), who has a persistent flu he just can’t seem to shake off, causing him to slip in and out of delirium.

An old buddy drags him on a drinking trip with a psychotic pseudo-academic; a writer friend asks Petrov to help him commit suicide; memories of a school New Year’s celebration constantly stir up repressed trauma. Amidst this, Petrov has to take care of his son (Vladislav Semiletkov), who has an even worse fever, whilst also dealing with his strained relationship with ex-wife Petrova (Chulpan Khamatavoa), a librarian with a murderous streak.

Much of the story is told in showy long-takes that play with our perceptions of time and scale. One shot has a character exit a room, turn around and go straight back in – and it’s suddenly a week later. Another take cranes over the characters and trundles over a snow-trodden path, the scale of which seems to morph before our very eyes into a model shot of a village despite the path seemingly remaining the same. It would be pointlessly extravagant if it wasn’t so keenly played, with an eye for the headlong forward-motion that the film needs in order to keep all of its woozy, half-remembered plates spinning.

The soundtrack, filled with doomy, grungy Russian rock (including an astounding cover of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds’ “Tupelo”) adds to that sense of deliberate muddiness, like a a blocked nose that’s forever dulling your senses. No surprise that Petrov’s Flu is so musically confident, given that Serebrennikov’s previous film was Leto, the biopic of the cult Russian New Wave band Kino.

Petrov’s malady is a metaphor for the chaotic state of modern-day Russia, where the network of symbols and the structure of daily life – held in stringent, authoritarian place during the Soviet era, but dissipating in the modern world of political cronyism and oligarchy – has long since ceased to have any real meaning for the denizens of the country. In this sense, there’s a similarity in outlook to Radu Jude’s brilliant Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, though where that film was essayistic and intellectual, there’s something deeply more instinctual and musical to Serebrennikov’s vision of post-communist sociological collapse. A surreal and dizzying trip down a series of nightmarish avenues.

Petrov's Flu is in UK cinemas from 11 February.